Aravind Adiga Awarded Man Booker Prize

Aravind Adiga won the 40th Man Booker prize for his debut novel, The White Tiger. According to the New York Times, "Adiga, who lives in Mumbai, was born in India and brought up partly in Australia. He studied at Columbia and Oxford and is a former correspondent for Time magazine in India." At 33, he is the second youngest writer to win the award after Ben Okri, who was 32 when he won the 1991 Booker for The Famished Road. Michael Portillo, chairman of the panel of judges, said Adiga's novel won "because the judges felt that it shocked and entertained in equal measure." Adiga described The White Tiger as an "attempt to catch the voice of the men you meet as you travel through India--the voice of the colossal underclass. This voice was not captured, and I wanted to do so without sentimentality or portraying them as mirthless humorless weaklings as they are usually." This year's shortlist for the Man Booker prize included The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry, Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh, The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant, The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher and A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz. Portillo stated that the main criterion for the prize is: "Does this book knock my socks off? And this did."