The English Patient novel wins 2018 Golden Man Booker Prize

‘The English Patient’, the wartime love story by Michael Ondaatje, has won the Golden Man Booker Prize at the closing event of the Man Booker 50 Festival in Royal Festival Hall at Southbank Centre in London on July 8, 2018. The prize was instituted to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Man Booker prize. The English Patient is a compelling work of fiction – both poetic and philosophical. It is that rare novel which gets under your skin and insists you return to it time and again, always yielding a new surprise or delight. It moves seamlessly between the epic and the intimate – one moment you’re in looking at the vast sweep of the desert and the next moment watching a nurse place a piece of plum in a patient’s mouth. That movement is mirrored in the way your thoughts, while reading it, move between large themes – war, loyalty, love – to tiny shifts in the relationships between characters.