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Life of Pi wins Booker Prize

After a heated 70-minute session on Tuesday night, the judges voted four to one for Life of Pi, published by the Edinburg-based Canongate.

At a dinner in the British Museum's Great Court in London to announce the winner, the chairman of the judges, writer and critic Lisa Jardine, said: "We have chosen an audacious book in which inventiveness explores belief. It is, as the author says, a novel, which will make you believe in God, or ask yourself why you don't."

Martel (39), a philosophy graduate who did odd jobs before making a living as a writer from the age of 27, edged out five others short-listed, including Indian-born Rohinton Mistry's Family Matters.

He is the third Canadian to win the prize after Michael Ondaatje in 1992 and Margaret Atwood in 2000. He divides his time between writing, yoga and volunteer work at a care unit.

Martel thanked his family in French and praised readers in English for "having met his imagination halfway".

Modestly, he said, "Of the six fine books on the shortlist, mine was the luckiest."

The prize money has been increased from 20,000 to 50,000 pounds from this year and the award has been renamed Man Booker Prize.

India's Arundhati Roy had won the award in 1997 for her novel God of Small Things and Salman Rushdie in 1993 for his book Midnight's Children.

Martel was viewed as the bookmakers' favourite. His novel is the story of Pi, an unusual boy brought up in a zoo in India. Pi's father decides to move the family to Canada. But when the ship taking them across the Pacific sinks, Pi finds himself on a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra with a broken leg and a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker. Somehow, he must survive.

This year, the award was in the news for all the wrong reasons. In an embarrassing slip-up last week, the official website prematurely, and mistakenly, named him the winner.

Bookmakers William Hill suspended betting on the prize because of a huge increase in bets. But in fact, it was just one of six press releases that had been prepared and the winner was not chosen until Tuesday night.

The ones which failed to make the grade are Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry, now a Canadian citizen, Unless by Carol Shields, Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor, Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, and Dirt Music by Tim Winton.

Irish author William Trevor had been second favourite to win the title with William Hill giving odds of 2-1. Sarah Waters, currently enjoying fame following the television adaptation of her lesbian costume drama Tipping the Velvet, had been tipped as third favourite at 4-1.

The Booker Prize was set up in 1969 "to reward merit, raise the stature of the author in the eyes of the public, encourage an interest in contemporary quality fiction and increase sales of the books."

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