Yann Martel

Yann Martel (born June 25, 1963, Salamanca, Spain) is a Canadian author best known for Life of Pi (2001), the story of the eponymous Indian teenager adrift at sea, after a shipwreck, in a lifeboat shared with a Bengal tiger.

The son of peripatetic Canadian parents—his father was a diplomat as well as an accomplished poet—Martel lived in such countries as Spain, Costa Rica, France, Mexico, and the United States. He completed his secondary education in Canada at Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario (1979–81), and continued his studies at Trent University (1981–84; 1986–87) and Concordia University (1984–85), earning a B.A. in philosophy. Martel established himself as a writer with the publication of The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, and Other Stories (1993), followed by his first novel, Self (1996), both of which introduced consistent thematic concerns in his fiction, including the complexities of illness, sexuality and identity, death and dying, and the burden of grief and loss.

In 2001 Martel received international acclaim for Life of Pi, which features elements of fable, fantasy, and magic realism. The book was awarded the prestigious Booker Prize and was published in more than 30 languages. It later was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film (2012) directed by Ang Lee. Propelled by the success of Life of Pi, in 2010 Martel published Beatrice and Virgil, an allegorical adventure meant as a literary representation of the Holocaust in which animals—a donkey and a monkey, albeit stuffed and on display in a taxidermist’s shop—converse and interact with human characters. Although the work was met with mixed reviews, Martel effectively utilized animals as vehicles for telling the story, projecting them with human qualities, so “the animal is both itself and something else, a kind of canvas.” He repeated that approach—this time featuring a chimpanzee—in The High Mountains of Portugal (2016), an imaginative foray into the mysteries of existence composed of a trio of interlocking novellas, set decades apart, that each serve to confirm the importance of religion and to emphasize the author’s perspective on the relationship between storytelling and faith: “I’ve always been struck how…religion is profoundly narrative. All religions convey stories and I think that speaks to who we are as a species.”