The Booker: Place bets now!

It’s that time of year again, when the literati turns its eyes to the world of the Man Booker Prize and the bookmakers…

The relationship between the Man Booker and the bookies has always been strange. In 2002 an announcement stating that Life of Pi had won appeared on the Booker website four days before the awards; consequently all betting on the prize was suspended. Officials went on to say that in fact six ‘winner’s’ webpages were prepared prior to the announcement, it was just pure chance that the one accidentally uploaded to the website was the one for Life of Pi. Could this possibly have affected the outcome of the prize? Life of Pi did go on to win after all and while we’re sure the judges would say the book deserved to win, could it in fact have been a case of expectation and exposure skewing the results?*

Then in 2006 bookies reported a massive upsurge in betting on Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, hours before it was announced as the winner too. This leads one to suspect that there’s some very literary, and perceptive, punters out there.

This year we’ve already had the ‘Best of the Booker’. Betting was suspended again five days before the outcome when William Hill saw the correlation between bets and the voting pattern for Midnight’s Children . Public voting continued nonetheless, however in the eyes of the bookmakers and press it was already over: Rushdie had won.

So if you fancy a flutter, why not check out the latest odds here? The results will be announced just before half past ten tonight…

*See Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science for more of this sort of thing.