Life of Pi sort of with a capital 'S' – something that would direct my life." He spoke of being lonely and needing direction in his life, and found that writing the novel met this need. The name of Martel's tiger, Richard Parker, was inspired by a character in Edgar Allan Poe's nautical adventure novel "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" (1838). In this book, Richard Parker is a mutineer who is stranded and eventually cannibalized on the hull of an overturned ship (and there is a dog aboard who is named Tiger). The author also had in mind another occurrence
Max and the Cats number of zoo animals caged in the hold—but after being rescued and making a life for himself in Brazil continues to find his German past impossible to escape. The novel came to widespread public attention in 2002 when Canadian writer Yann Martel won the Man Booker Prize for "Life of Pi". Martel's novel is about a boy, Pi, who finds himself trapped on a boat with a tiger after the ship he and his family are sailing on sinks. The family were zookeepers, and the animals they were transporting in the hold sink with the rest of the ship, except