Life of Pi Life of Pi Life of Pi is a Canadian fantasy adventure novel by Yann Martel published in 2001. The protagonist is Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel, an Indian boy from Pondicherry who explores issues of spirituality and practicality from an early age. He survives 227 days after a shipwreck while stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. The novel has sold more than ten million copies worldwide. It was rejected by at least five London publishing houses before being accepted by Knopf Canada, which published it in September 2001. The UK edition won
Folio Prize rival of the Man Booker Prize by the media. Margaret Atwood said the Folio Prize is "much needed in a world in which money is increasingly becoming the measure of all things." Mark Haddon said it was "not a mechanism for generating publicity by propelling a single book into the spotlight but a celebration of literary fiction as a whole." The Folio Prize in its first two years was given to an English-language book of fiction published in the UK by an author from any country. The prize remuneration in the first two years was £40,000. It was initially called