About the author.

Yann Martel is a Canadian author best known for the Man Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi. He has won a number of literary prizes, including the 2001 Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and the 2001-2003 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. He is also the first Canadian to represent the Washington Arts Commission.
Martel, the son of Nicole Perron and Émile Martel, was born in Salamanca  in 1963, Spain. His parents were French-speaking Quebecers. Although his first language is French, Yann Martel writes in English.
His father was posted as a diplomat for the Canadian government at the time of his birth. He was raised in Costa Rica, France, Mexico, and Canada. As an adolescent he attended high school at Trinity College School, a boarding school in Port Hope, Ontario.

As an adult, Martel has spent time in Iran, Turkey and India. After studying philosophy at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, Martel spent 13 months in India visiting mosques, churches, temples and zoos, and spent two years reading religious texts and castaway stories. He now lives in Saskatoon, Canada. His first published fictional work, Seven Stories, appeared in 1993.