(From top) Naipaul, Rushdie, Roy, Desai

London, Feb. 21: Four novelists of Indian origin — V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai — will fight it out to decide which author has written the best Booker Prize book during celebrations to mark the literary award’s 40th anniversary.

Rushdie is the hot favourite but since members of the public will have a vote, they may go for an English author rather than back a bearded fellow who has, in the past, been unkind about Margaret Thatcher, allegedly not shown enough gratitude for Britain, which protected him when Ayatollah Khomeini wanted him murdered and has since left London for what he said was a more agreeable life in Manhattan.

But he did win the Booker in 1981 with Midnight’s Children, which many literary critics feel is the most important novel to come out of India since independence. This was recognised when he won the “Booker of Bookers” in 1993 in the 25 th year of the prize.

Ladbrokes, the bookmakers, has Rushdie in the lead with Midnight’s Children at 4/1, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient at 6/1 and in joint third Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger and Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin at 7/1.

William Hill has listed Yann Martel’s Life of Pi as favourite to win at odds of 4/1. Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children runs a close second at 5/1 and Ondaatje’s The English Patient just behind that at 7/1.

The public will choose from a shortlist of six novels to be selected by a panel of judges chaired by author and former Booker judge, Victoria Glendinning. The two other judges are writer and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup and John Mullan, professor of English at University College London. Their shortlist will be announced in May, and public voting will then begin on the Man Booker Prize website.

Since Indians are passionate participants of anything online, Rushdie should perhaps encourage them to treat the contest as a sort of literary Indian idol and vote early and often. In the past, the BBC scrapped online political polls when one L.K. Advani, whom no one had heard of in England, came out on top as the greatest politician of the day. Later, Amitabh Bachchan won when the BBC ran a poll to identify the greatest superstar that has ever existed.

Glendinning commented today: “The Best of the Booker is a wonderful opportunity to read, or re-read, some of the best literature in English of the past four decades. We are having a very good time revisiting the now-classic novels, which won the Booker long ago, as well as the celebrated ones from recent years. All readers will enjoy this, and we look forward to hearing what the voters think — and which one, from our shortlist, they will judge the Best of the Booker.”