Life Of Pi Research Paper

All throughout the world, people from different backgrounds long for a sense of adventure. Yann Martel, a Canadian author famous for his novel Life Of Pi, is a young and new author who is able to feed this hunger for adventure through his numerous short stories and novels. While growing up in a family that was always travelling, Martel developed his own sense of adventure and a love for the diverse cultures and ideas he encountered. His even spent a lot of time researching the aspects of life in India, including the religious aspects, to do the Indian culture justice in his popular novel, Life Of Pi. Yann Martel used his experiences gained from traveling around the globe as a child and as an adult to infuse his writing with cultural aspects

One writer says, “He is considered one of the brightest new fiction writers in North America… Ambitious and experimental, Martel is a fiction writer who can spin a powerful story of often unusual and extreme events” (Peck). This is seen when Martel emerges with his first book, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, in 1993. Three years later, in 1996, Martel comes back even stronger with his first novel, Self. The novel is about sexual identity, which made it an unusual book compared to other books being written at the time. It was not until 2002 that Martel became incredibly well-known for his storytelling skills with his book, Life Of Pi (Holcombe). The book is about Pi, a boy from a zoo in India that gets stranded on a lifeboat with a tiger. Martel says that he stresses the importance of animals in the book because they are crucial to the plot, but also because they amaze him. He also says that the reason the book is so graphic and detailed is so that he will be able to cope with it if it eventually happens to him. Martel also noted that he tends to use simplistic writing in order to paint a more complex picture, like he does with the entire plot and his descriptions of religion and Pi’s feelings (Sielke 21). Because of all the attention the book and its realness were getting, it was turned into a film in 2012. The film ended up winning an Academy Award (Sterafin). Life Of Pi ended up winning the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction (Peck), and the Man Booker Prize for Fiction