The White Tiger Wins Booker

The winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize, which is awarded annually for a novel written by an author from Britain, Ireland, or one of the Commonwealth nations, was announced Tuesday night during the Frankfurt Book Fair.

The debut novel, The White Tiger, by Aravind Aviga was selected to win the prestigious award, including a check for about $86,000 in US currency, because as one judge stated the novel:

shocked and entertained in equal measure.

The White Tiger is a vivid exploration of India’s class struggle told through the story of a village boy who becomes the chauffeur to a rich man. Mr. Adiga said his book was:

an attempt to catch the voice of the men you meet as you travel through India — the voice of the colossal underclass.

According the the New York Times:

When he accepted the award, Mr. Adiga dedicated it to “the people of New Delhi where I lived and where I wrote this book.” When asked what he would do with the money, Mr. Adiga joked, “The first thing I am going to do is to find a bank that I can actually put it in.”

Mr. Adiga, 33, 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. He is the second youngest writer to win the award; Ben Okri was 32 when he won for The Famished Road in 1991.

The book is being published in the US by Free Press and the paperback was released yesterday.

Trade Paperback
October 14, 2008
$14.00

304 pages
ISBN-10: 1-4165-6260-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6260-3

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