Man Booker Prize Celebrates 40th Birthday With 'Best of the Booker" Award

It was 1993 when Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children was honored as the best novel to have ever won theMan Booker Prize for Fiction in the prestigious literary accolade’s 25-year history. Now, Booker has announced it will present a second one-off award, “The Best of the Booker,” to celebrate its 40th anniversary, the BBC reports. A panel of judges will select six eligible books before handing the final decision over to the public, which can vote for their favorite novel via the Booker’s Web site starting in May. Each year since 1969, the Booker Prize has rewarded what it deems the year’s best novel written by a citizen of the British Commonwealth or Ireland -- in addition to the acclaim and a boost in book sales, the winner also receives 50,000 GBP. Last year, the honor went to Anne Enright for her novel The Gathering, and in 2006, it went to Kiran Desai, author of The Inheritance of Loss. Both authors have been able to embark on worldwide book tours as a result.