The White Tiger, a debut novel by Aravind Adiga has won the 2008 Man Booker prize and with it the £50,000 prize. The novel is described as a ‘compelling, angry and darkly humorous’ novel about a man’s journey from Indian village life to entrepreneurial success. It was described by one reviewer as an ‘unadorned portrait’ of India seen ‘from the bottom of the heap’.
The judging panel for the 2008 Man Booker Prize for Fiction comprised: Michael Portillo, former MP and Cabinet Minister; Alex Clark, editor of Granta; Louise Doughty, novelist; James Heneage, founder of Ottakar’s bookshops; and Hardeep Singh Kohli, TV and radio broadcaster.
Michael Portillo commented:
“The judges found the decision difficult because the shortlist contained such strong candidates. In the end, The White Tiger prevailed because the judges felt that it shocked and entertained in equal measure.
“The novel undertakes the extraordinarily difficult task of gaining and holding the reader’s sympathy for a thoroughgoing villain. The book gains from dealing with pressing social issues and significant global developments with astonishing humor.”
Portillo went on to explain that the novel had won overall because of ‘its originality’. He said that The White Tiger presented ‘a different aspect of India’ and was a novel with ‘enormous literary merit’.
Aravind Adiga studied at Columbia and Oxford Universities and is a former correspondent for Time magazine in India. Adiga’s articles have also appeared in publications such as the Financial Times, Independent and Sunday Times.
