Martel's roaring success wins Booker Prize

With the help of a huge and bad tempered Bengal Tiger, the Booker Prize recovered its roar last night.

Yann Martel, the 39-year-old Canadian novelist, shipwrecked the expectations of pundits and publishers to win the £50,000 Man Booker Prize for fiction. His eccentric and entrancing third novel, 'Life of Pi', beat fancied contenders such as Sarah Waters and William Trevor to secure a narrow victory.

Martyn Goff, the prize administrator, revealed that the 70-minute debate between the judges had been heated, but denied that they had suffered any "blood on the walls''. Professor Lisa Jardine, who chaired this year's judging panel, called 'Life of Pi' "an audacious book in which inventiveness explores belief. It is, as the author says, a novel which will make you believe in God – or ask yourself why you don't'.'

'Life of Pi', published by the independent Scottish firm Canongate, is the most unusual Booker victor in a decade. Martel is also the second Canadian to carry the award across the Atlantic within three years. In 2000, Margaret Atwood won with 'The Blind Assassin'.

The son of diplomats, Martel was born in Spain, spent his childhood travelling the world with his parents and now lives in Montreal. His novel was prompted by tall tales that he heard in India. It combines an adventure yarn with the exploration of religious faith and doubt. Its adolescent hero, Pi Patel, grows up in a family zoo. There he learns a respectful curiosity not only about the animals, but also about the faith of all the people around him. He practises as a Christian, Muslim and Hindu without discerning any contradictions.

The precocious philosopher needs all his wisdom when the ship transporting the family animals to America sinks. Pi spends seven months adrift on a raft with a hyena, an orangutan, a sick zebra and a 450lb tiger named Richard Parker. This section provides the novel with its strange and compelling climax. Martel plays as deftly with notions of reality and illusion, dogma and story, as Pi does with his ferocious companion.

After a run of solid, well-established Booker winners, the first year of sponsorship by the Man Financial Services Group has seen an adventurous choice.

Professor Jardine promised a year of challenge and surprise when she and her colleagues began their deliberations. Last night, assisted by one of recent fiction's most memorable beasts, they delivered exactly that. The Booker, whatever its critics may say, has proved that it is no longer the respectable pussy-cat of literary awards.

Winner extract

I still smart a little at the slight. When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling. My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition. I mock this skull. I look at it and I say, "You've got the wrong fellow. You may not believe in life but I don't believe in death. Move on!" The skull snickers and moves ever closer but that doesn't surprise me. The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity ­ it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud. The pink boy also got the nod from the Rhodes Scholarship committee. I love him and I hope his time at Oxford was a rich experience. If Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, one day favours me bountifully, Oxford is fifth on the list of cities I would like to visit before I pass on, after Mecca, Varanasi, Jerusalem and Paris.