19 Facts About Yann Martel

Yann Martel was born in Salamanca, Spain, in 1963 to French-Canadians Emile Yann Martel and Nicole Perron who were studying at the University of Salamanca.

Yann Martel's mother was enrolled in Hispanic studies while his father was working on a PhD on Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno.

Yann Martel's parents joined the Canadian foreign service, and he was raised in San Jose, Costa Rica; Paris, France; and Madrid, Spain; with stints in Ottawa, Ontario, in between postings.

Yann Martel completed his final two years of high school at Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario, and he completed an undergraduate degree in philosophy at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario.

Yann Martel worked at odd jobs as an adult, including as a parking lot attendant in Ottawa, a dishwasher in a tree-planting camp in northern Ontario, and a security guard at the Canadian Embassy in Paris.

Yann Martel travelled through Mexico, South America, Iran, Turkey, and India.

Yann Martel started writing while he was at university, writing plays and short stories that were "blighted by immaturity and dreadful", as he describes them.

Yann Martel had been in New York the previous day, leaving on the evening of the 10th for Toronto to make the publication of his novel the next morning.

Yann Martel was inspired in part 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.

Yann Martel received some criticism from Brazilian press for failing to consult with Scliar.

Yann Martel pointed out that he could not have stolen from a work he had not yet read, and he willingly acknowledged being influenced by the New York Times review of Scliar's work and thanked him in the author's note of Life of Pi.

Yann 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".

Yann Martel then spent a year in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, from September 2003 as the Saskatoon Public Library's writer-in-residence.

From 2005 to 2007, Yann Martel was visiting scholar at the University of Saskatchewan.

From 2007 to 2011, Yann 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 more than a hundred novels, plays, poetry collections, graphic novels and children's books.

Yann Martel was invited to be a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2014.

Yann Martel sat on the Board of Governors of the Saskatoon Public Library from 2010 to 2015.

Yann Martel has said in a number of interviews that Dante's Divine Comedy is the single most impressive book he has ever read.

Yann Martel said that he read it when he was ten years old, and it was the first time he found a book so heartbreaking that it moved him to tears.