The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (Atlantic) has been named the winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

Adiga, who was born in Chennai, India, was raised partly in Sydney, completed his HSC in NSW, and is a dual Australian-Indian citizen. He studied further in the US and now lives in Mumbai. He has ‘wanted to be a novelist since I was a boy' he says in a Q&A on the Booker website. ‘I studied English literature--a lot of Elizabethan drama--at university, and wanted to write a novel about India that would be vivid, political, and funny'.

The third debut novelist (and the second Indian debut author) to win the prestigious prize, at 33 years old, Adiga is also the second-youngest recipient of the coveted £50,000 (A$124,586) award, according to the Guardian.

The White Tiger is distributed in Australia by Penguin Group (Australia). ‘We're absolutely thrilled for Aravind, and our publishing colleagues at Atlantic,' said Penguin general sales manager Louise O'Leary. ‘Reorders for The White Tiger are already flying out of the warehouse, the presses are working overtime, and the reprint is due in stores early next week.'

The novel follows a man's journey from an Indian village to a successful, entrepreneurial existence.

One review, by Peter Robins in the UK's Telegraph says ‘The White Tiger is a furious and brutally effective counterblast to smug ‘India is shining' rhetoric... [it] directs hard, well-aimed kicks at hypocrisy and thuggery on the traditionalist Indian Left.

‘It is certain of its mission, and pursues it with an undeviating determination you wouldn't expect in a first novel. It reads at a tremendous clip.'

This year's announcement was made by chair of the judges Michael Portillo, who said it was a ‘difficult' decision. ‘In the end, The White Tiger prevailed because the judges felt that it shocked and entertained in equal measure'. ‘The novel undertakes the extraordinarily difficult task of gaining and holding the reader's sympathy for a thoroughgoing villain,' he said. ‘The book gains from dealing with pressing social issues and significant global developments with astonishing humour.' Portillo added that it is a novel with ‘enormous literary merit'.

Adiga beat Australian author Steve Tolz to the prize. Tolz was shortlisted for his novel A Fraction of the Whole (Hamish Hamilton). Toltz and the other shortlisted authors, Philip Hensher (The Northern Clemency, Fourth Estate), Linda Grant (The Clothes on Their Backs, Little, Brown), Amitav Ghosh (Sea of Poppies, John Murray), and Sebastian Barry (The Secret Scripture, Faber & Faber), receive £2,500 (A$6,234) each and a designer-bound edition of their book.

Judges for the 2008 prize were former MP and Cabinet Minister Michael Portillo; editor of Granta Alex Clark; novelist Louise Doughty; founder of Ottakar's bookshops James Heneage; and TV and radio broadcaster Hardeep Singh Kohli.

A video interview with Aravind Adiga will soon be available on the Man Booker website, and Penguin has posted an excerpt from the novel here.

Source: http://www.booksellerandpublisher.com.au/articles/2008/10/09841/

This article from Thorpe Bowker's Weekly Book Newsletter and Media Extra is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

Tags: amitav ghosh, aravind adiga, linda grant, philip hensher, sebastian barry, steve tolz