Culture of Canada win the Man Booker Prize for "The English Patient". Margaret Atwood won the Booker in 2000 for "The Blind Assassin" and Yann Martel won it in 2002 for the "Life of Pi". Carol Shields's "The Stone Diaries" won the Governor General's Awards in Canada in 1993, the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2013, Alice Munro was the first Canadian to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for her work as "master of the modern short story". Munro is also a recipient of the Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime
Beatrice and Virgil was around $3 million, probably the highest ever advance for a single Canadian novel. Martel's earlier novel, "Life of Pi", won the 2002 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and sold seven million copies worldwide. Early on in the story, the protagonist, an author, (some say that the protagonist is a reflection of Yann himself) makes reference to Primo Levi's "If This Is a Man"; Art Spiegelman's "Maus"; David Grossman's "See Under: Love"; Martin Amis's "Time's Arrow"; George Orwell's "Animal Farm"; Albert Camus's "The Plague"; and Pablo Picasso's "Guernica". Extracts are quoted from Flaubert's "The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator" which