Yann Martel
The Canada Council awarded its first writing grant to Yann Martel in 1991. In 1997 it supported the writing of Life of Pi, which eventually emerged as a finalist for a Governor General’s Literary Award in 2001. Then in 2002, with fellow Canadians Rohinton Mistry and Carol Shields also short-listed, Yann Martel won the United Kingdom’s prestigious Man Booker Prize for fiction. In the introduction to the book, Martel writes: “I would like to express my sincere gratitude to that great institution, the Canada Council for the Arts, without whose grant I could not have brought together [Life of Pi]…. If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.”(1) Life of Pi has since gone on to become an international best-seller and has been translated into several languages. Martel is currently (October 2003 to June 2004) the writer-in-residence at the Saskatoon Public Library, a residency supported by the Canada Council.
1. Extracted from Life of Pi by Yann Martel. Copyright 2001 Yann Martel. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf Canada.)