Booker Prize for Aravind Adiga

Surprise Success of Debut Novel About Modern Day Indian Society

Oct 15, 2008

A fresh young face has been welcomed to the high society of literature, after White Tiger, one of the two debut novels shortlisted, was awarded the Man Booker Prize 2008.

With his debut novel White Tiger Aravind Adiga, 33, is the surprise winner of this year's Man Booker Prize 2008, which awards £ 50,000 (about 87,000 USD) to the lucky author. Irish writer Sebastian Barry, who had been shortlisted before in 2005, was regarded as a favourite by many experts with his novel The Secret Scripture. And also Amitav Ghosh with Sea of Poppies, first novel of a trilogy, ranked high in expectations. Australian Steve Toltz was the second debut novelist to be nominated besides Adiga. The ceremony was held on October 14 in the Guild Hall in London.

Adiga creates a portrait of two faces of India, which are like two sides of a coin: the shiny and new side of uprising wealth, confident, well educated and cosmopolitan – and the poor, stuck in age-old tradition, seemingly without a chance for improvement. Or an India of Light, and an India of Darkness, as the book's hero Balram Halwai calls it.

He is the son of a rickshaw puller, born into the second, the poor India. Taken out of school to work, he nurtures his dream of escape and success after luck reveals to him a world beyond the Ganges mudbanks: Hired as a driver for the wealthiest man in the village he discovers the lure of a life in luxury.

While Balram ruthlessly follows his ambition and rises up through layer after layer of Indian society to become an big entrepreneur, modern day India with its complexities and contradictions unfolds in front of the reader's eye.

Balram's rise over circumstances is a compelling read, although or maybe even more as its hero is an unpleasant villain – it is Adiga's achievement to capture the reader's interest and create sympathy for the character. Adiga, who worked as a journalist before and while writing the book, wove his insights into the rapidly changing Indian society into this story.

Biography of Aravind Adiga

Aravind Adiga was born in Madras, an important industrial city and port in southeastern India, in 1974 and partly raised in Australia. He studied at the universities of Columbia and Oxford. He worked as a journalist and as a correspondent for TIME magazine. Currently he lives in Mumbai, India.

Adiga turns out to be the second youngest author to win the Booker Prize, and he is the fourth coming from India, after Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai.

This was a big night for India: Not only did Aravind Adiga's triumph emphasize the significance of Indian authors; it also became a reminder of another Booker Prize winner from India. Salman Rushdie was awarded a special honorary Booker Prize for his novel Midnight's Children, which won the prize 15 years ago. A jury voted his novel the best winning book of the 40 years that the Booker Prize exists.

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