Yann Martel, (born June 25, 1963) is a Canadian author who wrote the Man Booker Prize–winning novel Life of Pi, an international bestseller published in more than 50 territories.
It has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide and spent more than a year on the bestseller lists of the New York Times and The Globe and Mail, among many other best-selling lists.
Life of Pi was adapted for a movie directed by Ang Lee, garnering four Oscars including Best Director and winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score.
Martel is also the author of the novels The High Mountains of Portugal, Beatrice and Virgil, and Self, the collection of stories The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, and a collection of letters to Canada's Prime Minister 101 Letters to a Prime Minister.
Martel was born in Salamanca, Spain, in 1963 to French-Canadians Émile Martel and Nicole Perron who were studying at the University of Salamanca.
His mother was enrolled in Hispanic studies while his father was working on a PhD on Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno.
The family moved to Coimbra, Portugal, soon after his birth, then to Madrid, Spain, then to Fairbanks, Alaska, and finally to Victoria, British Columbia; his father taught at the Universities of Alaska and Victoria.
His parents joined the Canadian foreign service, and he was raised in San José, Costa Rica, Paris, France, and Madrid, Spain, with stints in Ottawa, Ontario, in between postings.
Martel completed his final two years of high school at Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario, and he completed an undergraduate degree in philosophy at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario.
Martel worked at odd jobs as an adult, including as a parking lot attendant in Ottawa, a dishwasher in a tree-planting camp in northern Ontario, and a security guard at the Canadian embassy in Paris.
He also travelled through Mexico, South America, Iran, Turkey, and India.
He started writing while he was at university, writing plays and short stories that were "blighted by immaturity and dreadful", as he describes them.
1988
Martel's work first appeared in print in 1988 in The Malahat Review with his short story Mister Ali and the Barrelmaker.
1990
The Malahat Review also published in 1990 his short story The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, for which he won the 1991 Journey Prize and which was included in the 1991–1992 Pushcart Prize Anthology.
1991
Martel credits The Canada Council for the Arts for playing a key role in fostering his career, awarding him writing grants in 1991 and 1997.
In the author's note of his novel Life of Pi, he thanked them and wrote: "… If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams."
1992
In 1992, the Malahat brought out his short story The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American Composer John Morton, for which he won a National Magazine Award gold.
1993
The cultural magazine Border Crossings published his short story Industrial Grandeur in 1993.
That same year, a bookstore in Ottawa that hosted Martel for a reading issued a handcrafted, limited edition of some of his stories, Seven Stories.
In 1993, Knopf Canada published a collection of four of Martel's short stories: The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, the eponymous story, as well as The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto..., Manners of Dying, and The Vita Aeterna Mirror Company.
On first publication, the collection appeared in Canada, the UK, France, Netherlands, Italy, and Germany.
1996
Martel's first novel, Self, appeared in 1996.
It was published in Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, and Germany.
2001
He has won a number of literary prizes, including the 2001 Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and the 2002 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature.
Martel lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, with writer Alice Kuipers and their four children.
His first language is French, but he writes in English.
Martel's second novel Life of Pi, was published on September 11, 2001, and was awarded the Man Booker Prize in 2002, among other awards, and became a bestseller, spending 61 weeks on The New York Times Bestseller List.
2002
Martel was the Samuel Fischer Visiting Professor at the Institute of Comparative Literature, Free University of Berlin in 2002, where he taught a course titled "The Animal in Literature".
2003
Martel moved to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, with Kuipers in 2003.
Life of Pi was later chosen for the 2003 edition of CBC Radio's Canada Reads competition, where it was championed by author Nancy Lee.
He then spent a year in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, from September 2003 as the Saskatoon Public Library's writer-in-residence.
He collaborated with Omar Daniel, composer-in-residence at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, on a piece for piano, string quartet and bass.
The composition, You Are Where You Are, is based on text written by Martel, which incorporates parts of cellphone conversations from an ordinary day.
2004
Its French translation, Histoire de Pi, was included in the debut French version of the competition Le combat des livres in 2004, championed by singer Louise Forestier.
2005
From 2005 to 2007, Martel was visiting scholar at the University of Saskatchewan.
2010
Martel had been in New York the previous day, leaving on the evening of the 10th for Toronto to make the publication of his novel the next morning.
He was inspired in part to write a story about sharing a lifeboat with a wild animal after reading a review of the novella Max and the Cats by Brazilian author Moacyr Scliar in The New York Times Book Review.
Martel received some criticism from Brazilian press for failing to consult with Scliar.
Martel pointed out that he could not have stolen from a work he had not yet read, and he willingly acknowledged being influenced by the New York Times review of Scliar's work and thanked him in the author's note of Life of Pi.
Beatrice and Virgil, his third novel, came out in 2010.
