Yann Martel, CC (born June 25, 1963), is a Canadian author who wrote the novel Life of Pi, which won the Man Booker Prize. The book is an international bestseller published in more than 50 territories. It has sold over 12 million copies worldwide and was on the bestseller lists of The New York Times and The Globe and Mail for more than a year, as well as many other lists. Life of Pi was adapted into a movie with the same name, directed by Ang Lee. The film won four Academy Awards, including the Academy Award for Best Director, and received the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score.
Martel is also the author of other books, including the novels The High Mountains of Portugal, Beatrice and Virgil, Son of Nobody, and Self, the story collection The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, and the letter collection 101 Letters to a Prime Minister. He has won several literary awards, such as the 2001 Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and the 2002 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature.
Martel lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, with writer Alice Kuipers and their four children. His first language is French, but he writes in English.
Early life
Yann Martel was born in Salamanca, Spain, in 1963. His parents, Émile Martel and Nicole Perron, were French-Canadians studying at the University of Salamanca. His mother studied Hispanic culture, while his father worked on a PhD about the Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno. After Martel was born, his family moved to Coimbra, Portugal, then to Madrid, Spain, and later to Fairbanks, Alaska. They eventually settled in Victoria, British Columbia. His father taught at the Universities of Alaska and Victoria. His parents worked for the Canadian foreign service, and Martel grew up in San José, Costa Rica; Paris, France; and Madrid, Spain. He also lived in Ottawa, Ontario, during some of his parents’ assignments. Martel finished his last two years of high school at Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario. He earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario.
As an adult, Martel worked various jobs, including as a parking lot attendant in Ottawa, a dishwasher, a worker in a tree-planting camp in northern Ontario, and a security guard at the Canadian Embassy in Paris. He also traveled to Mexico, South America, Iran, Turkey, and India. He began writing plays and short stories during his university years. He later described these early works as being affected by immaturity and poor quality.
In 2003, Martel moved to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, with Kuipers.
Career
Martel's work first appeared in print in 1988 in The Malahat Review with his short story Mister Ali and the Barrelmaker. In 1990, The Malahat Review also published his short story The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, which earned him the 1991 Journey Prize and was included in the 1991–1992 Pushcart Prize Anthology. In 1992, The Malahat Review published his short story The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American Composer John Morton, for which he received a National Magazine Award gold. The cultural magazine Border Crossings published his short story Industrial Grandeur in 1993. That same year, a bookstore in Ottawa that hosted Martel for a reading released a handcrafted, limited edition of some of his stories titled Seven Stories.
Martel credits The Canada Council for the Arts for helping develop his career, giving him writing grants in 1991 and 1997. In the author's note of his novel Life of Pi, he thanked them and wrote: "… 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."
In 1993, Knopf Canada published a collection of four of Martel's short stories: The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, the eponymous story, The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto…, Manners of Dying, and The Vita Aeterna Mirror Company. The collection was first published in Canada, the UK, France, the Netherlands, Italy, and Germany.
Martel's first novel, Self, appeared in 1996. It was published in Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, and Germany.
Martel's second novel, Life of Pi, was published on September 11, 2001, and won the Man Booker Prize in 2002, among other awards. It became a bestseller, spending 61 weeks on The New York Times Bestseller List. Martel had been in New York the day before the publication, leaving on the evening of the 10th for Toronto to ensure the novel was released the next morning. He was inspired to write a story about sharing a lifeboat with a wild animal after reading a review of the novella Max and the Cats by Brazilian author Moacyr Scliar in The New York Times Book Review. Martel received some criticism from Brazilian press for not consulting with Scliar. He explained that he could not have stolen from a work he had not yet read and acknowledged being influenced by the New York Times review of Scliar's work. He thanked Scliar in the author's note of Life of Pi. Life of Pi was later chosen for the 2003 edition of CBC Radio's Canada Reads competition, where it was championed by author Nancy Lee. Its French translation, Histoire de Pi, was included in the debut French version of the competition, Le combat des livres, in 2004, championed by singer Louise Forestier.
Martel was the Samuel Fischer Visiting Professor at the Institute of Comparative Literature, Free University of Berlin in 2002, where he taught a course titled "The Animal in Literature." He then spent a year in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, from September 2003 as the Saskatoon Public Library's writer-in-residence. He collaborated with Omar Daniel, composer-in-residence at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, on a piece for piano, string quartet, and bass. The composition, You Are Where You Are, is based on text written by Martel, which includes parts of cellphone conversations from an ordinary day.
From 2005 to 2007, Martel was a visiting scholar at the University of Saskatchewan.
Beatrice and Virgil, his third novel, was published in 2010. The work is a symbolic representation of the Holocaust, focusing not on historical witness but on using imagination to create a new understanding of the period. The main characters in the story are a writer, a taxidermist, and two stuffed animals: a red howler monkey and a donkey.
From 2007 to 2011, Martel ran a book club with the then Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, sending the Prime Minister a book every two weeks for four years, a total of over 100 novels, plays, poetry collections, graphic novels, and children's books. The letters were published as a book in 2012, 101 Letters to a Prime Minister. The Polish magazine Histmag cited Martel as the inspiration behind their gift of ten books to the Prime Minister of Poland, Donald Tusk, which were donated by publishers and selected by readers of the magazine. Tusk responded positively.
Martel was invited to be a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2014. He served on the Board of Governors of the Saskatoon Public Library from 2010 to 2015.
His fourth novel, The High Mountains of Portugal, was published on February 2, 2016. It tells the story of three characters in Portugal across three different time periods, each dealing with love and loss in their own way. It appeared on The New York Times Bestseller List within the first month of its release.
Influences
Martel has stated in several interviews that Dante's Divine Comedy is the most amazing book he has ever read. When discussing his most memorable childhood book, he remembers Le Petit Chose by Alphonse Daudet. He read it when he was ten years old, and it was the first book that made him feel so sad it caused him to cry.
Authors who have influenced his writing include Dante Alighieri, Franz Kafka, Joseph Conrad, Nikolai Gogol, Sinclair Lewis, Moacyr Scliar, Thomas Hardy, Leo Tolstoy, Alphonse Daudet, J.M. Coetzee, and Knut Hamsun.
Politics
Martel donated money to candidates in the 2017 and 2026 federal New Democratic Party leadership races. In 2017, Martel gave $1,500 (Canadian dollars) to Charlie Angus, which was close to the maximum allowed amount. In 2026, Martel donated $2,040 (Canadian dollars) to Avi Lewis. Martel was listed among several well-known people who supported progressive causes and gave larger donations during the 2026 races.
Martel donated $7,000 to Charlie Clark’s 2021 mayoral campaign in Saskatoon and $10,000 to Clark’s 2016 campaign. During that campaign, Martel was actively involved in helping Clark. Martel also gave $5,000 to Ryan Meili in the 2018 Saskatchewan NDP leadership race.
In a 2022 article, Martel wrote that replacing Saskatoon’s central library was an important public project that deserved support.
Personal life
As of 2016, Martel had lived in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan for 13 years. According to journalist Phil Tank, Martel stated he "loves the winters in Saskatoon, but believes the city is affected by racism and held back by old ideas."
When talking about living in Saskatoon in 2016, Martel noted, "What I like is that Saskatoon has become more diverse. I see this in my children’s school, where there are more visible minorities. There are more students from South Asia, such as India and Pakistan, more Muslims, and more people from Africa. There is a greater variety of backgrounds."