‘THE ENGLISH PATIENT’ WINS BOOKER PRIZE

London, July 9: Sri Lanka-born Canadian literary icon Michael Ondaatje's ‘The English Patient’ has won the special one-off Golden Man Booker Prize to mark the 50th anniversary of the prestigious literary award here.

‘The English Patient’ is a tale of love and conflict during World War II.

The 74-year-old author beat the Man Booker Prize’s previous 51 winners including Indianorigin V.S. Naipaul for his 1971 winner ‘In a Free State’; Salman Rushdie for ‘Midnight’s Children’ (1981), Arundhati Roy for ‘The God of Small Things’ (1997); Kiran Desai for ‘The Inheritance of Loss’ (2006); and Aravind Adiga for ‘The White Tiger’ (2008).

“Not for a second do I believe this is the best book on the list o r any other list that could have been put together of Booker novels,” Ondaatje said at the awards ceremony at London's Southbank on Sunday.

He said he suspected the 1996 Oscar-winning adaptation of his novel, starring Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche and Kristen Scott Thomas, probably had something to do with the result of the public vote.

Previously, ‘The English Patient’ had shared the 1992 Booker Prize with Barry Unsworth’s 18th century slave tale ‘Sacred Hunger’.

All 51 previous Booker winners were considered by a panel of judges, who whittled them down to one from each decade. The public then voted on their ultimate favourite and settled on Ondaatje’s wartime romance. — PTI