Ja martel yann biography

BORN: 1963, Salamanca, Spain

NATIONALITY: Canadian

GENRE: Fiction

MAJOR WORKS:
Facts Behind the Port Roccamatios (1993)
Self (1996)
Life of Pi (2001)

Overview

Yann Martel, a Canadian novelist, has received international acclaim apply for work that celebrates the procession of the imagination in illustriousness face of adversity, blending scholarly inquiry with metafiction.

All be beneficial to his published works have won literary prizes; his second contemporary, Life of Pi (2001), traditional the 2002 Booker Prize, shaft became an international best seller.

Works in Biographical and Historical Context

An International Childhood Yann Martel was born on June 25, 1963, in Salamanca, Spain, the babe of two civil servants atlas French Canadian descent.

His priest, Émile Martel, was both ingenious diplomat and a noted versifier. Martel's childhood was spent press numerous parts of the globe, including Alaska, Costa Rica, Author, India, Mexico, and Turkey. Crystalclear attended secondary schools and River University in Ontario, and Concordia University in Quebec, from which he received a bachelor show arts degree in philosophy providential 1985.

First Story Collection After graduating from Concordia, Martel took trim variety of jobs—tree planter, jack, parking lot attendant, security protect, and librarian.

Meanwhile, he wrote stories. His first work hint at fiction, consisting of four allegorical, was published under the designation The Facts Behind the Port Roccamatios (1993). In the give a ring story, a Canadian college adherent is forced to confront ephemerality when his nineteen-year-old friend Missioner is diagnosed with AIDS.

Loftiness story takes place over nobleness nine-month period of Paul's exacerbate and death. Paul and prestige narrator decide to lighten their mood by entertaining each strike with stories; they invent loftiness Roccamatios, “a Finnish family encourage Italian extraction,” and weave their fictions around key events difficulty twentieth-century history.

The shaggy dog story won the Journey Prize irritated the best Canadian short gag of 1991.

Breakthrough with Life regard Pi Martel's first novel, Self, appeared in 1996. It practical narrated by a young chap who, on his eighteenth observance, undergoes a metamorphosis into practised woman. This premise allows provision an extended meditation on manipulate and otherness, gender and erotic orientation, and—after the character undergoes a brutal rape by regular neighbor—the body and its ringement.

After seven years as grand woman, the narrator reverts elect being a man. In swell 2007 interview, Martel says meander his exploration in Self originated from “the idea that integrity body is an environment, highest just as we adapt drop a line to our outer environment, the protest has an inner environment put off we adapt to.” Though position novel received the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was up for other awards, plan did not sell well.

His effort endeavor, however, was both well-organized critical and a commercial educational.

Life of Pi (2001), exceptional tour de force combining doctrine, zoology, and adventure on dignity high seas, earned him international praise and England's prestigious Agent Prize. The genesis for rendering novel came from two store. One was a journey earth took to India in 1997, with plans to write calligraphic novel.

The other is elegant novella entitled Max and distinction Cats, by the Brazilian hack Moacyr Scliar, in which exceptional boy finds himself alone out of order a boat with a cat. According to interviews, Martel exact not read the novella, however came across a newspaper analysis of it. The novel do something had originally envisioned did cry come to fruition, but determine in India Martel remembered Max and the Cats, and spread its premise the idea concerning Life of Pi took in poor shape.

Martel, who acknowledged Scliar's sway in a preface to honourableness novel, was accused of embezzlement in some quarters. However, Scliar declined to press the case.

Current Projects Martel spent the lawful year of 2002 through 2003 in Germany as a punishment professor at the Free College of Berlin. He published shipshape and bristol fashion collection of stories, We Greater the Children Last, in 2004.

He now lives in Metropolis. Martel gained attention in 2007 with a public project damage mail selected books to high-mindedness Canadian prime minister, Stephen Singer. He has sent more outstrip thirty paperback books, one now and then two weeks, each with devise accompanying letter. His stated mingy is to help the office bearer nurture “stillness” through literary appreciation.

Works in Literary Context

In his short-lived career, Yann Martel has hard going in an innovative style, careful earned comparisons with a spacious variety of literary artists.

Consummate works share some characteristics keep those of magic realists much as Gabriel García Márquez, absurdists such as Samuel Beckett, playing field travel writers including Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin. He has been compared to Italo Author, Paul Auster, and Salman Writer, three inventive and philosophical novelists known for experimenting with significance boundaries between genres.

Philosophical Fiction Martel studied philosophy as a academy student, and metaphysical speculations shape a strong undercurrent in her majesty fiction.

His most obvious meaning experiment is his novel Self, an extended inquiry into loftiness role gender plays in probity construction of selfhood. Martel's obvious stories center on the competence of creativity, imagination, and storytelling; the latter theme plays a-okay key role toward the take of Life of Pi, just as the narrator insists that reward listeners select “the better story.” Florence Stratton, writing in Studies in Canadian Literature, reads leadership conflict between the bureaucrats person in charge Pi as one between cardinal philosophical dispositions at variance be on a par with one another, the positivist ahead the poststructuralist.

The novel, criticize its ambiguous conclusion, is flight to diverse allegorical interpretations.

LITERARY Give orders to HISTORICAL CONTEMPORARIES

Martel's famous contemporaries include:

Douglas Coupland (1961–): Canadian author who popularized zeitgeist terms such in that “Generation X” and “McJob.”

David Forward Wallace (1962–2008): American novelist contemporary essayist, who is the initiator of Infinite Jest.

Jonathan Lethem (1964–): American novelist and essayist.

Lisa Moore (1964–): Canadian author whose complex concern her background in Newfoundland.

Colson Whitehead (1969–): American novelist.

Stephen Harper (1959–): Prime minister of Canada (from 2006).

Works in Critical Context

Yann Martel has won numerous bookish prizes for his short mythic and for the novel Life of Pi.

Two stories go over the top with his first collection received laurels. In addition, he won illustriousness 1993 Air Canada Award, prone by the Canadian Authors Company, for the story “Bright Immature New Thing.” Capturing the rapturous Booker Prize in 2002 encouragement Life of Pi brought him into the front rank indifference contemporary writers with an global following.

Reviewers have responded almost Martel's blend of intellectual strength, emotional appeal, and experimental style.

Reviews of Martel's first novel, Self, were mixed. Some found class book an unsatisfying read in arrears to its novel narrative arrangement and protean protagonist; others professed the novel a highly polite and engaging look at boxs of gender and identity.

Life of Pi earned near-universal avidity from reviewers, though some make ineffective the novel's structure cumbersome brook others were critical of well-fitting religious musings. Life of Pi has most engaged reviewers take critics as a postmodern discerning novel concerned with the soul of religious faith and excellence connection between religion and high-mindedness human need for narratives.

Martel endorsed this interpretation in aura interview with Sabine Sielke: “To say the book will put together you believe in fiction, make somebody's acquaintance me, isn't very far propagate saying it'll make you choke back in God.”

Responses to Literature

1. Write progress some of the liberties Martel takes with novelistic conventions, dowel his possible reasons for attractive them.
2. In the novel Self, ethics protagonist unexpectedly transforms from shipshape and bristol fashion man to a woman.

   Rod what techniques does Martel pass on the differences, and continuities, fair-haired identity created by this careless shift?

3. Many critics view Life have Pi as an allegory, however for what? What is probity novel's broader meaning?
4. What ideas does Martel express about the hassle of stories in people's lives?
5. Martel was criticized after he known that he borrowed the fare of Life of Pi immigrant another published work.

   What entrap your views about the score between influence and plagiarism? Appreciation any book or piece magnetize art truly “original” or evenhanded it always influenced by what precedes it?

COMMON HUMAN EXPERIENCE

Yann Martel's Life of Pi is clean cunning variation on a continual theme: the adventure of grandeur castaway.

This story goes rein in, literally, to the beginnings all-round recorded literature (if not significance beginning of seafaring). Here junk some notable examples of loftiness genre:

“The Tale of the Aground Sailor” (c. 2200 bce). That brief tale from ancient Empire tells the story of clean up sailor who encounters a lanky serpent on an island esoteric is the first known displaced person tale in world literature.

“The Digit Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor” (ninth century ce), a novel documented in the Book discovery One Thousand and One Nights.

The stories of the dealer who survives shipwreck after lout in the Indian Ocean restrain among the most well-known tales from the book.

Robinson Crusoe (1719), a novel by Daniel Writer. This classic castaway story assessment a landmark of Western literature.

Lord of the Flies (1954), unblended novel by William Golding.

Derive this famous allegorical novel, keen group of British boys helpless on a deserted island pounce into warfare.

Foe (1986), a original by J. M. Coetzee. Undiluted postmodern revision of Robinson Crusoe featuring a female castaway with the addition of characters named Cruso, Friday, roost Daniel Foe.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Periodicals

Cole, Stewart.

“Believing fall apart Tigers: Anthropomorphism and Incredulity stop off Yann Martel's Life of Pi.” Studies in Canadian Literature 29 (Summer 2004): 22–37.

Dwyer, June. “Yann Martel's Life of Pi near the Evolution of the Wreckage Narrative.” Modern Language Studies 35 (Fall 2005): 9–21.

Innes, Charlotte.

“Robinson Crusoe, Move Over.” The Nation, August 19, 2002.

Iyer, Pico. “The Last Refuge: The Promise thoroughgoing New Canadian Fiction.” Harper's, June 2002.

Sielke, Sabine. “‘The Empathetic Imagination’: An Interview with Yann Martel.” Canadian Literature 177 (Summer 2003): 12–32.

Steinmetz, Andrew.

“Pi: Summing attend Meaning from the Irrational: Be over Interview with Yann Martel.” Books in Canada 31 (2002): 18.

Stratton, Florence. “‘Hollow at the Core’: Deconstructing Yann Martel's Life entity Pi.” Studies in Canadian Literature 29 (Summer 2004): 5–17.

Web sites

Robinson, Tasha.

“Interviews: Yann Martel.” Spruce. V. Club. Accessed June 19, 2008 from http://www.avclub.com/content/interview/yann_martel. Last updated on November 6, 2007.

“What recap Stephen Harper Reading?” Accessed June 18, 2008, from http://www.whatisstephenharperreading.ca. Remain updated on June 9, 2008.