Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, favourable for Best of Booker prize

London, pti:India-born Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is the bookies’ favourite to win the ‘Best of Booker’ prize that will be announced this month to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the prestigious award.

Latest odds published on Monday by bookmaker Ladbrokes shows that Midnights Children, the Booker winner for 1981, is the top favourite with 4/1 odds to win the literary prize.

This is the second time that a celebratory award has been created by the prize. In 1993, the 25th  anniversary Rushdie won the Booker of Bookers for the same book.

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, winner of the 1992 Booker, is placed second at 7/1, while another Indian origin author Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss (2006) has 10/1 odds.

William Hill, another major bookmaker, places the second highest odds on Midnight’s Children, while The Life of Pi by Yann Martel (2002 winner), is placed at the top with odds at 4/1.

The God of Small Things by Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy, the 1997 winner, has 7/1 odds placed against it.

‘The Best of the Booker’ will honour the best overall novel to have won the prize since it was first awarded on 22 April 1969. In all, 41 novels are eligible for the award.

For the first time, ‘The Best of the Booker’ will be inviting the public to help decide on which novel deserves to take this prestigious one-off award.

The public will choose from a shortlist of six novels to be selected by a panel of judges chaired by Victoria Glendinning.

The two other judges on the panel 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 begin on the Man Booker Prize website.

The winner will be announced at the London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre in July.

Argentine teen is mother of 7

An Argentine girl who turns 17 on Monday has become a mother of seven after giving birth to her second set of triplets, drawing attention to teen sex education and contraception laws in her Catholic country, media reports said, reports AFP from Buenos Aires.

The adolescent, who was not named because she is a minor, prematurely delivered three girls each weighing 1.7 kilograms last on Tuesday, the newspaper La Voz del Interior said, quoting doctors in the central city of Cordoba.
She already has a two-year-old boy born when she was 14, and another set of girl triplets born 18 months ago, when she was 15. She also suffered a miscarriage in her past.

Jolie, Pitt expecting second baby: report

Hollywood power couple Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are expecting their second child, People magazine reported on its website citing a source close to the couple, reports AFP from Los Angeles.

The report came after a beaming Jolie appeared with Pitt at the Independent Spirit Awards on Saturday in a black dress that revealed a clear baby bump.

The source told People that Jolie and Pitt were “thrilled to be adding to their brood” and were “very, very happy”.
Pitt (44) and Jolie (32) also are parents to adopted Cambodian son Maddox (6); four-year-old Vietnamese son Pax; three-year-old Ethiopian daughter Zahara and biological daughter Shiloh, who was born in Namibia in May 2006.

$ 65 mn donated for gay rights

The estate of Ric Weiland, a high school classmate of Microsoft Corp founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen and one of the first five people to work at the software giant, has left $ 65 million to gay rights and HIV/AIDS organisations, reports AP from Seattle.

The bequests were announced on Sunday by the Pride Foundation of Seattle, where Weiland was a board member for several years. The foundation called it the largest single bequest ever given to gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans-gender causes.

Gates and Allen hired Weiland in 1975, the year they founded Microsoft. He worked as a project leader for the Microsoft Works word processing and spreadsheet software, and was a lead programmer and developer for the company’s BASIC and COBOL systems, two of the first personal computing interfaces. He left Microsoft in 1988.

Weiland donated tens of millions to various organisations from gay rights groups to environmental and education organisations before he died in 2006.

He committed suicide at age 53 after a long battle with depression.