Salman Rushdie won a literary prize.
Salman Rushdie . His second novel , Midnight 's Children ( 1981 ) , won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was deemed to be `` the best novel of all winners '' on two separate occasions , marking the 25th and the 40th anniversary of the prize . Rushdie was strongly favoured to have received the Nobel Prize in Literature but the Nobel organisers were later quoted as saying that they would have been `` too predictable , too popular . ''