Martel wins Booker for second time

Canadian Yann Martel tonight became the only author ever to win the prestigious Booker prize twice in one year.

Bookmakers had to suspend betting on the outcome of the £50,000 prize earlier this month after the award’s official website accidentally displayed a dummy page naming Martel as the winner.

Organisers insisted similar pages had been prepared for all of the shortlisted authors and Martel said earlier tonight that he had hoped it was a lucky omen.

But he was not in need of omens. His book, Life of Pi, is billed as “a novel that will make you believe in God”, and certainly inspired faith among the judges.

It tells the story of Pi Patel, whose family are killed during an ocean crossing in 1977, leaving Pi adrift in a lifeboat in the Pacific for 227 days with a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker for company.

The novel focuses on the relationship between boy and beast before Pi is eventually washed ashore.

A preface to the book claims Martel heard the tale from an elderly man in India and tracked Pi down to his new home in Canada, and the question of whether or not the story could ever be true is central to the novel.

It is Martel’s third book and has already won the 39-year-old the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction.

His own background is also dominated by travel – he was born to Canadian parents in Spain and grew up in Alaska, Canada, Costa Rica, France and Mexico.

He studied philosophy at university and has been a full-time writer for some 12 years, living in Montreal where he said he divided his time between writing, yoga and volunteering in a palliative care unit.

In an essay entitled How I Wrote Life of Pi, Martel says the inspiration for the book came from a review of another novel, Max and the Cats, by Brazilian writer Moacyr Scliar.

That story tells of a Jewish family which emigrates to Brazil in 1933, only for their ship to sink, leaving one of the family alone with a black panther.

“The book fatigued Updike but it had the effect on my imagination of electric caffeine,” he wrote, saying that he had loved the idea but could not find the book and tried to forget about it.

But years later he was travelling in India when inspiration struck, following a miserable night in Bombay.

“I had written two paltry books that had sold about a thousand copies each. I had neither family nor career to show for my 33 years on Earth,” he wrote in the essay, published on the Powell’s Books website.

He travelled out of Bombay to Matheran where, sitting on a boulder, he remembered the story of Max and the Cats.

“Suddenly, my mind was exploding with ideas. I could hardly keep up with them. In jubilant minutes whole portions of the novel emerged fully formed: the lifeboat, the animals, the intermingling of the religious and the zoological, the parallel stories.”

He immediately began visiting Indian zoos before returning to Canada to research biology and animal psychology and read castaway stories before beginning writing.

“The rest was hard, fun work, a daily getting it down on the page that came not without hurdles, not without moments of doubt, not without mistakes and rewrites, but always, always with deep, gratifying pleasure, with a knowledge that no matter how the novel would fare, I would be happy with it, that it helped me understand my world a bit better,” he wrote.