I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS SINCE 2001

Life of Pi is a fantasy adventure novel by Yann Martel published in 2001. The protagonist, Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel, an Indian boy from Pondicherry, explores issues of spirituality and practicality from an early age. He survives 227 days after a shipwreck, while stranded on a boat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger.



The novel was rejected by at least five London publishing houses before being accepted by Knopf Canada, which published it in September 2001. The UK edition won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction the following year.

The novel won the 2003 Boeke Prize, a South African novel award. In 2004, it won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in Best Adult Fiction for years 2001–2003.

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RICHARD PARKER

Richard Parker is the name of the 450-pound Bengal tiger that is stranded on the lifeboat with Pi when the ship sinks. The tiger lives on the lifeboat with Pi and is kept alive with the food and water Pi delivers. Richard Parker develops a relationship with Pi that allows them to coexist in their struggle.

Martel named the tiger after a character from Edgar Allan Poe's nautical adventure novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). However, there were a number of other men named Richard Parker who are relevant to Martel's choice, and that are tied to tales of cannibalism by shipwrecked sailors. Such tales abounded in the 18th and 19th centuries. For instance, in December 1835, the ship Francis Spaight was wrecked in the north Atlantic. Survivors of the wreck were known to have practiced cannibalism in order to survive. In January 1846, a second ship named "Francis Spaight" sank, and took a man named Richard Parker down with it. Another man named Richard Parker was found to be the victim of cannibalism after being set adrift with three other men on a raft in 1884, after a yacht called The Mignonette sank, leaving the crew stranded and starving.

In 1884, 46 years after Poe's novel was published, a new shipwreck shared many similarities with that story: after the sinking of their yacht Mignonette on the way to Australia, Captain Tom Dudley and three sailors were stranded in a dinghy in the Pacific Ocean. They believed they had no choice but to eat one of the party to survive. The victim was a 17-year-old cabin boy named Richard Parker. A.W. Brian Simpson's book on the subject mentions the Francis Spaight and also refers to a boat called Tiger on which a youth was cannibalized in 1766. Having read about these events, Yann Martel thought, "So many victimized Richard Parkers had to mean something."