Vancouver, October 23
Canada’s Yann Martel has won the £ 50,000 Booker Prize this year, defeating fellow Canadians Carol Shields and Indian-born Rohinton
Mistry.
Both Mistry’s and Martel’s books are based on Indian characters. Martel’s ‘Life of Pi’ revolves around a certain Pi Patel brought up in the Pondicherry zoo. When the family moves to live in Canada, the boat is shipwrecked and Pi finds himself on a raft with a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra and a Bengal tiger.
Mistry’s ‘Family Matters’ is a survey of Indian life in the mid-1990s in Mumbai. It is about
Nariman, whose life is ruined when his family bullies him into abandoning his beloved Lucy in order to marry within the Parsi faith. His tragedy looks set to be repeated when, at the end of the novel, his son-in-law
Yezad, a moderate Parsi until now, takes up the mantle of fundamentalism.
While the cumulative effect of Mistry’s efforts is a novel that is intensely moving, Martel’s book is a mixture of adventure with magic realism.
Martel, 39, a philosophy graduate and son of diplomats, had been the bookmakers’ favourite even before the awards last night.
As if it was a sign of the impending good news, the organisers, in a goof-up, had announced last week on their website the name of Mr Martel as the winner. Large bets on the author flooded in. The organisers claimed that the announcement was a mistake and that a dummy page had accidentally been put on the site.
However, the judges insisted the winner was chosen last night before the award ceremony at the British Museum, after a heated 70-minute session when the judges chose ‘Life of Pi’ over ‘Family Matters’ and Carol Shields’ ‘Unless’.
After the award, Martel said, “When this started it was like being in a plane. The plane is about to crash, everything is shaking and the engines have fallen. But now I feel like I am in the arms of a beautiful woman.’’
The chairman of the judges’ panel was writer and critic Lisa Jardine and the judges included novelist and lecturer Russell Celyn Jones, novelist and psychologist Sally Vickers and literary editor of The Times Erica Wagner. Martel, born in Spain and living in Montreal, is not particularly religious, is not particularly religious.
He said he was avowedly secular when he set out to research the book after hearing the story.
“It was a journey for me. We all know what is wrong with religion. Most people know just about enough about it to dismiss it, but we forget what is right about it. It will not have lasted this long otherwise,” he said.
“People say the book is very ambitious, but it was an easy book to write. Art should be ambitious; we are only here for a few minutes so we may as well tackle the big issues,” the writer said.
UNI, PTI
