Yann Martel

Yann Martel is a Canadian author, born in 1963 in Salamanca, Spain, to French-Canadian parents who were studying and working abroad. The son of a diplomat, he spent a peripatetic childhood in countries including Costa Rica, France, Mexico, and Canada, and later traveled widely as a young adult. He studied philosophy at Trent University in Ontario before turning to writing.

Martel is best known for his novel Life of Pi, published in 2001, which tells the story of a young Indian boy named Pi who survives a shipwreck and is stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger. Blending adventure, philosophy, and questions of faith and storytelling, the novel won the Booker Prize and became an international bestseller, later adapted into an acclaimed film by Ang Lee.

His other works include the novels Self and Beatrice and Virgil, the latter using animal characters to address the Holocaust, as well as short fiction and nonfiction. Martel is known for blending the philosophical and the fantastical, and for exploring belief, meaning, and the power of narrative.

For several years Martel undertook a notable project of mailing a book every two weeks to the Canadian prime minister, with letters on the value of reading, later collected in book form. He continues to write fiction that engages big questions through inventive and allegorical storytelling.