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Rushdie, Seth among `must read' writers

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON, JUNE 5. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy are among the 50 novels by contemporary writers voted as "essential reads'' at Britain's Haye-on-Wye literary festival.

The selectors put them in the same class as Gabriel Garcia Marquez's A Hundred Years of Solitude, Philip Roth's American Pastoral, Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum and Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, among others.

This is the first time that such a list comprises works of only living writers so as not to give an unfair advantage to classics.

"Usually, `must read' lists focus on classics; therefore dead tend to do better than the living,'' said Kate Moss, founder of the Orange Prize whose sponsors compiled the list after a poll. Uniquely, none of the books on the list is a spin-off from cinema or television and all stand on their own merit as literary works. The Guardian, which organised the festival, noted that the pattern was "in contrast to last year's BBC Big Read (in which) almost all the top choices... .had momentum from TV or cinema.''

The Booker Prize, so far restricted only to writers from the Commonwealth countries, has decided to go global. Beginning next, there will be an additional Booker International Prize, open to writers from around the world. The £60,000 prize will be given once in two years to a living author who has published fiction either originally in English or whose work is availablein English translation.

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