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Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children has been voted by the public as the greatest Booker Prize winner of them all.
The novel was selected from a long list of 41 previous Booker winners, and had been the bookies' favourite on a shortlist of six nominated to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the prize.
Announcing the winner, Victoria Glendinning, the chairman of the judging panel that picked the shortlist, urged the organisers to allow the public to choose the Booker winner every year.
It is the third Booker Midnight's Children has picked up since it first won the award in 1981, having also been judged the Booker of Bookers for the award's 25th anniversary.
The shortlist this time included J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, which came second, and Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda. Pat Barker's The Ghost Road, Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist and J.G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur were also in the running.
Rushdie, 61, who was born in Mumbai but educated in England, is currently promoting his latest book in Chicago but sent a video message conveying his thanks to voters. His sons, Zafar and Milan, collected the trophy.
He said: "[I think of] how astonished my younger self writing Midnight's Children in the late 1970s would have been about this. It was written with such hope but not with the expectation that this book would still be interesting and relevant to people who were not even born when it was written."
Mariella Frostrup, the television presenter and Booker judge, said the book had an "unputdownable" quality that appealed for its literary skill, and for being a "bloody great read".
The judges defended the prize from critics who said it was merely a marketing exercise to boost book sales. Ms Frostrup said it gave a new generation of readers the chance to read extraordinary works of literature.
The prize is anticipated to once again drive up sales of Rushdie's novel. Janine Cook, fiction buyer for Waterstone's UK bookshop, said: "It still appeals to new readers."
- INDEPENDENT
