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
Man Booker International Prize was "fast becoming the more significant award, appearing an ever more competent alternative to the Nobel". In 2015 it was announced that the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize would be disbanded. The prize money from that award would be folded into the Man Booker International Prize, and the latter would become what the Independent prize used to be: a yearly book award for English translations, with the prize split between author and translator. Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare was named the inaugural International Prize winner in 2005. Head judge, Professor John Carey said Kadare is "a universal writer in the tradition of