A one-off Best of the Booker award announced!

There's a lot going on in the Man Booker Prize newsletter (21-02-08) and if I announce too many of the happenings, it would mean rehashing quotes and bits of news that many others who subscribe to the newletter would already have read about.

But one detail stands out.

To celebrate the prize's 40th anniversary, the Best of the Booker award will be handed out this year in addition to the annual award, presented every October. It is an award that heralds the championing of previous wins since the Booker was first launched on 22nd April, 1969.

A similiar celebratory award, The Booker of Bookers, was first handed to Salman Rushdie for Midnight Children in 1981.

This time, the public will decide which novel deserves to win in the one-off award, to be voted on the Man Booker Prize website, starting in May. The public will choose from a shortlist of six novels which would have been selected beforehand, by a panel of judges chaired by the biographer, Victoria Glendenning. The winner will be announced in July at the London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre.

The Man Booker Prize is Britain's most coveted literary prize and its eligibility is opened to (not self-published) novels written in English and published in the current year, by any living author from the UK, Republic of Ireland, Zimbabwe and the Commonwealth countries. It is also open to online novel editions from the same regions, placed on the web by an established imprint.

Read all about it and more over HERE.