Aravind Adiga won the 40th Man Booker prize for his debut novel, The White Tiger, just published here in paperback by Free Press ($14, 9781416562603/1416562605). According to the New York Times, "Adiga, who lives in Mumbai, was born in India and brought up partly in Australia. He studied at Columbia and Oxford and is a former correspondent for Time magazine in India." At 33, he is the second youngest writer to win the award after Ben Okri, who was 32 when he won the 1991 Booker for The Famished Road.
Michael Portillo, chairman of the panel of judges, said Adiga's novel won "because the judges felt that it shocked and entertained in equal measure."
Adiga described The White Tiger as an "attempt to catch the voice of the men you meet as you travel through India--the voice of the colossal underclass. This voice was not captured, and I wanted to do so without sentimentality or portraying them as mirthless humorless weaklings as they are usually."
This year's shortlist for the £50,000 (US$87,000) Man Booker prize included The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry, Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh, The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant, The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher and A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz.
The Guardian reported that Portillo also praised the way Adiga "undertakes an extraordinary task--he gains and holds the attention of the reader for a hero who is a thoroughgoing villain," and calls readers' attention to "important social issues: the division between rich and poor, and issues on a global scale. And it is extremely readable."
Portillo noted that the main criterion for the prize is: "Does this book knock my socks off? And this did."