BOOKMAKERS installed Salman Rushdie on Monday as hot favourite to land a one-off Best of the Booker award marking the 40th anniversary of one of the literary world's most prestigious prizes.

But Rushdie, best known for his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses which outraged many Muslims and prompted death threats against him, faces tough competition from a shortlist of literary heavyweights. They range from Australian Peter Carey to South Africa's Nobel Prize winners Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee.

Rushdie is bidding for a unique treble. In 1981 his novel Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize for Fiction. Then in 1993 the magical-realist exploration of Indian history was judged as the best novel to have won the Booker in the award's first quarter of a century.