Rushdie still on top, wins Best of the Booker prize

NEW HONOUR: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children beat out other literary masterpieces to bag Best of the Booker.

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New Delhi: More accolades for Sir Salman Rushdie. His Booker Prize-winning book, Midnight’s Children, has now bagged the Best of the Booker Award through a public poll.

Thirty six per cent of almost 8000 online poll participants voted for the celebrated book. The Best of the Booker poll was conducted to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

Incidentally, Midnight's Children won not just the Booker Prize in 1981 but also the Booker of Bookers in 1993, which is another celebratory prize to honour the best Booker Prize winner in the first 25 years of the award.

Rushdie beat out other literary masterpieces such as 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.

Rushdie's sons Zafar and Milan were in London to receive the award on his behalf, as the author himself was in the US. Rushdie accepted the award through a pre-recorded video message.

2008 has been a rather eventful year for Rushdie. Not only did Queen Elizabeth II made his knighthood official for his services to literature, Rushdie also returned to the literary scene in spring with his bewitching novel Enchantress of Florence

It's been 20 years since the controversy surrounding Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses first erupted, but the 60-year-old is certainly a force to be reckoned with in the global publishing arena.

He can't avoid the spotlight — whether it's the raking up of controversy surrounding the Satanic Verses or his troubled split with fourth wife top chef Padma Lakshmi — but clearly it's his writing that does the talking.