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
Yann Martel tree-planting camp in northern Ontario, security guard at the Canadian embassy in Paris; and travelled through Mexico, South America, Iran, Turkey, and India. He started writing while he was at university, writing plays and short stories that were, by his own admission, "blighted by immaturity and dreadful", but kept at it. Martel moved to Saskatoon, Canada, with his partner, the writer Alice Kuipers, in 2003. Martel's work first appeared in print in 1988 in "The Malahat Review" with his short story "Mister Ali and the Barrelmaker". The Malahat Review also published in 1990 his short story "The Facts Behind the