“The Booker Prize, currently under fire for concentrating on fashionable and quirky writers, will this week attempt to regain its reputation for high seriousness with the launch of the ‘super Booker’, a worldwide search for the living greats of fiction. While the winners of the main prize, due to be announced next week, must come from Britain or the Commonwealth, the new £60,000 competition will be open to all comers.” The top contenders for the first ‘Super Booker’, which will be given not for any individual book but for a lifetime of literary achievement, are V.S. Naipaul, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and John Updike.