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Bookies stop betting on Best of Booker award
By Matt | July 3, 2008
BOOKMAKERS have stopped betting on the Best of the Booker award because Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children now looks almost certain to win the one-off literary prize.
Rushdie’s novel, which won the Man Booker Prize in 1981, was 6/4 favourite with William Hill before the bookie stopped offering odds on the prize earlier today. Midnight’s Children was trading at 1.04 – about 25-1 on – around the same time.
According to a Press Trust of India story in The Hindu, a Hills senior executive said, “The voting pattern has been well established now and will not change”.
The public vote for the award will carry on until 8 July – and the winner will be announced as part of the London Literature Festival on 10 July – but the bookies clearly feel nothing will change the voting’s outcome.
Topics: Books and literature
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October 14th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
[...] 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 [...]