{"id":59915,"date":"2018-07-09T00:10:41","date_gmt":"2018-07-09T04:10:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=59915"},"modified":"2018-07-09T00:10:41","modified_gmt":"2018-07-09T04:10:41","slug":"lanka-born-michael-ondaatje-wins-golden-booker-award-for-novel-the-english-patient-as-the-best-among-booker-award-winers-for-the-past-fifty-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=59915","title":{"rendered":"Lanka -born Michael Ondaatje Wins Golden Booker Award for Novel “The English Patient” as the Best Among Booker Award Winers for the Past Fifty Years."},"content":{"rendered":"


\nBy<\/p>\n

Alison Flood<\/strong><\/p>\n

Twenty six years ago, the panel of judges were so unsure who should win the Man Booker in 1992 that they ended up with a tie: Michael Ondaatje and Barry Unsworth. But on Sunday evening Ondaatje edged ahead, with his bestselling novel The English Patient being named the best winner of the Booker prize of the last 50 years, in a public vote.<\/p>\n

The Golden Booker was held this year to mark a half-century of the prize. A panel of judges read all 52 former winners of the award, with each assigned a decade from the Booker\u2019s history. The Observer\u2019s Robert McCrum, taking on the 1970s, chose VS Naipaul\u2019s In a Free State; poet Lemn Sissay, reading the titles from the 1980s, went for Penelope Lively\u2019s Moon Tiger; The English Patient was novelist Kamila Shamsie\u2019s selection from the 1990s; Hilary Mantel\u2019s Wolf Hall was nominated as the best of the 2000s by broadcaster Simon Mayo, and George Saunders\u2019 Lincoln in the Bardo topped poet Hollie McNish\u2019s reading of the 2010s Booker winners. The five books were then put to a public vote.<\/p>\n

Speaking at the close of the Man Booker 50 festival in the Southbank Centre, London, on Sunday, Ondaatje said he had not reread The English Patient, which moves between a nurse tending a horribly burned man in an Italian villa at the end of the second world war and a tragic love affair from his past, since 1992.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cNot for a second do I believe this is the best book on the list, especially when it is placed beside a work by VS Naipaul, one of the masters of our time, or a major work like Wolf Hall,\u201d he said, adding: \u201cI suspect and know more than anyone that perhaps The English Patient is still cloudy, with errors in pacing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ondaatje said he felt it was important to acknowledge the authors who never won the Booker prize, specifically naming William Trevor, Barbara Pym and Alice Munro.<\/p>\n

Shamsie said Ondaatje\u2019s historical novel received the most votes, with nearly 9,000 votes cast by the public. Previous \u201cBest of Bookers\u201d surveys \u2013 carried out for the award\u2019s 25th and 40th anniversaries \u2013 were both won by Salman Rushdie\u2019s Midnight\u2019s Children.<\/p>\n

Shamsie described The English Patient as the sort of book that \u201cgets under your skin and insists you return to it time and again, always yielding a new surprise or delight\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cFew novels really deserve the praise: transformative. This one does,\u201d said Shamsie. \u201cIt moves seamlessly between the epic and the intimate \u2013 one moment you\u2019re in looking at the vast sweep of the desert, and the next moment watching a nurse place a piece of plum in a patient\u2019s mouth … It\u2019s intricately and rewardingly structured, beautifully written, with great humanity written into every page.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adapted into a multiple Oscar-winning film starring Ralph Fiennes as the desert explorer L\u00e0szl\u00f2 Alm\u00e0sy, Juliette Binoche as his nurse Hana and Kristin Scott Thomas as the married Katharine Clifton, The English Patient was one of the best-known books on the shortlist. Back in 1992, however, the two-hour meeting between Booker judges was \u201cpretty bloody\u201d, according to reports at the time.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery book on our shortlist had one passionate supporter and one furious antagonist. When at the final meeting we locked horns over the front runners, it was suggested that we should reach our decision by taking into account second choices \u2013 proportional representation,\u201d the chair of judges, Victoria Glendinning, wrote of the meeting, admitting that at one point she had called a fellow judge a \u201ccondescending bastard\u201d.<\/p>\n

Reading the Booker winners of the 1990s, Shamsie said she had been struck by the fact that there were six years in which just one or no women were on the award\u2019s shortlists. \u201cGod, can you imagine now if five years in a row the most women on a shortlist was one? … That has changed in the culture,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

But she said that The English Patient stood out, due to the Sri Lankan-born Canadian author\u2019s treatment of his female characters.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of books by male writers are only interested in the lives of men \u2013 they may be wonderful books, but the women figure quite peripherally,\u201d she said. \u201cHana to me is the centre of the novel, and is done with such love, care and understanding and complexity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shamsie batted away suggestions that the novel had won because it was the best-known on the shortlist, thanks to the film adaptation. \u201cHilary Mantel is very well known too, and if you\u2019re going to vote in something like this, you\u2019re probably voting because it matters to you,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

And The English Patient film, she said, focuses on Almasy\u2019s affair, while for her, the central love story is between Hana and Kip, an Indian Sikh bomb disposal expert. \u201cA lot of people when they\u2019re reading the book are probably imagining Ralph Fiennes though, and that doesn\u2019t hurt anything,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Courtesy:The Guardian<\/em><\/p>\n

Tweet<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Alison Flood Twenty six years ago, the panel of judges were so unsure who should win the Man Booker in 1992 that they ended up with a tie: Michael Ondaatje and Barry Unsworth. But on Sunday evening Ondaatje edged ahead, with his bestselling novel The English Patient being named the best winner of the …<\/p>\n

Continue reading ‘Lanka -born Michael Ondaatje Wins Golden Booker Award for Novel “The English Patient” as the Best Among Booker Award Winers for the Past Fifty Years.’ »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59915"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59915"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59916,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59915\/revisions\/59916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}