M. L. SALGANIK, Knight Commander of the Padma Shri Order
The 2008 Booker Prize went to the thirty-three-year-old Indian writer Aravind Adiga for his novel "The White Tiger". Aravind Adiga became the fifth Indian to win the Booker Prize in its forty-year history. His predecessors were W. S. Naipaul (1971), who later became a Nobel laureate, Salman Rushdie (1981), who received the Booker Prize in 1993, Arundhati Roy (1997) and Kiran Desai (2006).
Aravind Adiga was born on October 23, 1974 in Madras (now Chennai), the son of a surgeon who emigrated to Australia when his son was 15 years old. He studied first in Sydney, at the Graduate School of Agriculture, then studied English literature at Columbia College, Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1997, after which he continued his studies at Magdalene College, Oxford University.
Although Adiga dreamed of becoming a writer from childhood, he had to start his working life as a business correspondent for the Financial Times. Then, for three years, starting in 2003, he was Time Magazine's South-East Asia correspondent and lived in Delhi. Aravind Adiga currently lives in Mumbai.
Speaking at the award ceremony, Michael Portillo, Chairman of the jury, said::
"It was difficult for the jury to make a choice, because the final list included very strong candidates. In the end, "White Tiger" won, as the jury members found the novel equally shocking and fascinating. The novel coped with an incredibly difficult task: to win and maintain the reader's sympathy for the uncompromising scoundrel. White Tiger benefits greatly from presenting burning social issues and important global trends in a strikingly witty way... In White Tiger, India is presented from an unusual angle, and the novel itself has great literary merit."
The image of the " uncompromising scoundrel "brought the chairman of the jury to an unexpected comparison of the" White Tiger "with" Macbeth": unlike the Macbeth couple, who are tormented by the thought of wha ...
Read more