Yan Martel has won the £50,000 Man Booker Prize in the most surreal of circumstances, seven days after the organisers mistakenly announced his victory on their website.
But the decision, after 70 minutes of "heated debate", was not unanimous, with Martel emerging as winner on a four-to-one vote apparently over Rohinton Mistry's Bombay saga, Family Matters.
Ms Lisa Jardine, the chair of the judges, insisted the website fiasco had been an honest error, even though it prompted William Hill to close its books on the contest.The win is a boon for his tiny Edinburgh publishers, Canongate, who already have an international hit on their hands with Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White.
Critics have described Life Of Pi as "hilarious" and full of "grand originality". Ms Jardine said the judges were similarly enthralled. "It is, as the author says, a novel which will make you believe in God - or ask yourself why you don't."
Martel is the third Canadian to have won the prize, and was one of three shortlisted this year, including Mistry and the gravely ill Carol Shields. The son of diplomats, and pretty well unknown outside Canada, Martel had feared that the website blunder had scuppered his chances.
This year was supposed to be a new beginning, the start of a more transparent era, when the headlines would be made by the books and not the bitching. But this being the Booker, old habits, and axes, grind on.
Cameras were last night allowed in to witness the judges' final huddle, traditionally the focus of near masonic secrecy and conspiracy theories.
A rift has opened up between Ms Jardine and the chair of the Man Booker steering group, Mr Jonathan Taylor over the vast number of books the judges are expected to read - 130 this year, having called in an extra 12 themselves. Ms Jardine has argued that the number of novels submitted should be drastically cut to stop publishers entering books for the sake of it.
- (Guardian Service)