The public voted to choose Michael Ondaatje's novel "The English Patient" as the best Man Booker Prize winner. The special one-off award celebrates the 50th anniversary of the prestigious literary award.
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Michael Ondaatje's book "The English Patient" was voted the best novel to have won the Man Booker Prize in 50 years on Sunday.
The Canadian writer's book, which tells a tale of love and conflict during World War II, was awarded the Golden Man Booker Prize for fiction after winning a month-long public vote.
Read more:100 German Must-Reads - the list
The award is a special one-off honor to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Man Booker Prize.
The book won the Man Booker Prize in 1992 and was made into a film starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche in 1996 that won nine Academy Awards.
'Great humanity' in every page
A panel of judges selected five books from the 51 winners of the Booker Prize, with one from each decade.
The 1970s finalist was "In a Free State" by Trinidad-born V.S. Naipaul, while "Moon Tiger" by British writer Penelope Lively was the 1980s choice. Hilary Mantel's Tudor saga "Wolf Hall" and George Saunders' US Civil War symphony "Lincoln in the Bardo" were the finalists from the 2000s and 2010s.
Ondaatje said he did not believe "for a second" that his book was the best, paying tribute to the late "The English Patient" film director, Anthony Minghella, "who I suspect had something to do with the result of this vote."
Novelist Kamila Shamsie, one of the judges, said Ondaatje's book combined "extraordinary" language, continual surprises and compelling characters, including a Canadian nurse, an Indian bomb-disposal expert, a thief-turned-spy and an aristocratic Hungarian archaeologist.
"It's intricately (and rewardingly) structured, beautifully written, with great humanity written into every page," Shamsie said."Ondaatje's imagination acknowledges no borders as it moves between Cairo, Italy, India, England, Canada – and between deserts and villas and bomb craters."
9 German books that were adapted into great movies
Perfume, a best-selling book, was first adapted into a film — and now a TV series. Here's a selection of the most successful or best film renditions of novels by German authors.
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Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
It took 20 years before Patrick Süskind's 1985 bestselling historical fantasy novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer was finally turned into a movie. Director Tom Tykwer carried it off magnificently, with entertaining, sumptuous scenes starring Ben Whishaw and Karoline Herfurth.
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Das Boot
"One of the greatest war films made," said the critics. German director Wolfgang Petersen's 1981 filming of the novel by Lothar-Günther Buchheim is set in the faithful replica of a World War II German submarine. The film was Petersen's breakthrough to Hollywood and was nominated for six Oscars, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA award.
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The Tin Drum
The 1959 novel earned Günter Grass the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1979 came the film adaptation, starring the 13-year-old actor David Bennent as Oscar Matzerath, the boy who at age three decides to stop growing. Director Völker Schlöndorff's film was the first German production to take the Oscar for best foreign language film.
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Look Who's Back
Timur Vermes' 2012 debut novel, Look Who's Back, was a smash hit in Germany. His satire featured a character Germans tend not to take lightly: Adolf Hitler. The dictator wakes up in a park in Berlin in this millennium — and everyone believes he is an actor. David Wnendt adapted the book into a movie in 2016.
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In Times of Fading Light
The movie In Times of Fading Light was released in 2017, six years after Eugen Ruge's novel tracing the life of a family in East Germany hit the bookstores. Another example of a well-done adaptation of literature, director Matti Geschonneck's satirical movie explores the last days of the East German regime with humor and tragic depth.
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The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum
In 1975, two years before leftist Red Army Faction insurgents started making headlines in Germany with kidnappings and murders, Volker Schlöndorff adapted Heinrich Böll's novel The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum for the screen. The novel gives a detailed description of the social atmosphere in West Germany at the time. Schlöndorff cut right to the chase and hit the mark.
A best-selling book turned into a successful film: that's the exception rather than the rule, in particular if the book touches on a difficult topic. Bernhard Schlink's novel The Reader looks at the repercussions of the Nazi era in Germany, and how the country deals with its past. Stephen Daldry's 2008 adaptation was a strong film also thanks to the superb actors, Kate Winslet and David Kross.
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All Quiet on the Western Front
This film from the early days of sound movies is an excellent example of an arresting movie adaptation of a literary work. US director Lewis Milestone brought the horrors of WWI to the screen in 1930, based on Erich Maria Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front. The Nazis made sure the movie was rarely shown in Germany.
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Death in Venice
In 1971, Italian director Luchino Visconti surprised the world with his film adaptation of German author Thomas Mann's 1912 novella, Death in Venice. Visconti's movie is very close to the narrative tone of the original. The film starring Dirk Bogarde is ponderous, melancholy — and stunningly beautiful.
