Rushdie tipped to win "Best of Booker"

LONDON (Reuters) - Salman Rushdie is hot favourite to win the "Best of the Booker" award on Thursday which marks the 40th anniversary of one of the world's most coveted literary prizes.

The author, whose 1988 novel "The Satanic Verses" angered many Muslims and prompted death threats against him, was the overwhelming 1-8 frontrunner with "Midnight's Children", which won the Booker Prize in 1981.

He was up against five other shortlisted authors including Nobel Prize winners J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer.

Nick Weinberg of bookmakers Ladbrokes said Rushdie had attracted 90 percent of all wagers on the "Best of the Booker" award, possibly reflecting expectations that the public vote would go to the most recognisable of six eligible authors.

"Arts awards are, as a general rule, tough to predict and it's rare that one selection is backed to the exclusion of the rest," Weinberg said. "But that's exactly what's happened here."

"Midnight's Children", an example of Rushdie's magical realist style, follows Saleem Sinai who is born on the stroke of midnight on the day of India's independence in 1947 and whose life loosely parallels the fortunes of his nascent country.

Rusdhie was up against Pat Barker (The Ghost Road), Peter Carey (Oscar and Lucinda), Coetzee (Disgrace), J.G. Farrell (The Siege of Krishnapur) and Gordimer (The Conservationist).

He won the 25th anniversary version of the "Best of the Booker" prize in 1993.

Coetzee and Carey are the only two authors to have won the Booker Prize twice. The Booker rewards the best novel each year by a writer from Britain, Ireland or a Commonwealth country.