Salman Rushdie's 'Midnight's Children' is the clear favourite to win the 'Best of the Booker' Prize with bookmakers closing betting on the prize.
LONDON: India-born author Salman Rushdie's 'Midnight's Children' is the clear favourite to win the 'Best of the Booker' Prize with bookmakers closing betting on the prize that is scheduled to be announced here on July 10 following a global public voting.
"The voting pattern has been well established now and will not change," a senior executive of bookmakers William Hill said on Thursday.
A spokesperson for the prize, however, insisted that trends in betting are not a direct indication of the pattern of voting.
The winner is to be formally announced on July 10 as part of the London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre here.
Public voting for the award is officially open until 8 July, but William Hill have 'closed the book', and have stopped accepting bets. Rushdie was the firm favourite at 6/4 when the betting was closed.
Millions of people voted for the one-off award on the internet, including from India, through online partnerships, with national and international media, with libraries, reading groups and book retailers.
Besides Rushdie's 'Midnight Children', the other five contenders are: Pat Parker's 'The Ghost Road', Peter Carey's 'Oscar and Lucinda', J M Coetzee's 'Disgrace', J G Farrell's 'The Siege of Krishnapur' and Nadine Gordimer's 'The Conservationist'.
The award celebrates the 40th anniversary of the prestigious Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
The only time that a celebratory award has previously been created was in 1993, its 25th anniversary, when Rushdie won the 'Booker of Bookers' award with 'Midnight's Children'.
The story, however, was different in the village of Comrie in Perthshire, when the BBC's 'Culture Show' flooded villagers with hundreds of copies of the six short-listed books, and asked whether the villager's choice will be the same as the actual winner.
In the village, it was a closely fought battle for the first place as Farrell's 'The Siege of Krishnapur' narrowly beat Rushdie's 'Midnight's Children'.
Farrell's satirical novel, detailing the siege of an Indian town during the Indian Rebellion of 1857 told from three perspectives, emerged the most popular Best of Booker title in Comrie.
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