It’s the birthday of Canadian author Yann Martel (b. 1963), best known for his Man Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi (2001), in which an Indian boy loses his entire family in a shipwreck and ends up in a lifeboat with a tiger named Richard Parker.

Martel was born in Salamanca, Spain, where his Canadian parents were graduate students. While he was growing up, his parents joined the Canadian foreign service and moved around accordingly, so Martel grew up in Portugal, Spain, Costa Rica, France, Mexico, and Canada, where he finished high school at a boarding school in Port Hope, Ontario. He earned a B.A. in philosophy from Trent University in Ontario and for a time lived off his parents and did odd jobs while writing. His first book, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, and Other Stories, came out in 1993; his first novel, Self, came out in 1996 and was an exploration of sexual identity that Martel has compared to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Both books were respected; neither sold well.

Then one day Martel read a review of a book by Brazilian author Moacyr Scliar called Max and the Cats, about a boy in a lifeboat with a panther. He tried to find the book in Montreal, failed to do so, and forgot about it. Seven years later, Martel was traveling in India and found himself awakening to the several religions he encountered there and also to “the wonder of animals.” He remembered the premise of the Brazilian book (still not having read it) and decided to write his own story about a boy in a lifeboat with a dangerous cat. The result was Life of Pi (which has sold more than 13 million copies), a movie version directed by Ang Lee (2012), and a certain amount of scandal generated by the Brazilian press. Martel has said of his novel, “Life is a story; you can choose your own story; a story with God is the better story” (Paul Laity, “Interview: Yann Martel: ‘My children aren’t impressed that I won the Booker or that I wrote Life of Pi,’” theguardian.com, March 4, 2016). (NB: Life of Pi may be called many things, including magical realism, but it is first and foremost a terrifically entertaining story. What is more elemental, more urgent, than asking how one would survive a sojourn in a lifeboat with a tiger?)

Martel’s next novel, Beatrice and Virgil (2010), was an allegorical exploration of the Holocaust featuring talking animals and met with highly mixed reviews. The High Mountains of Portugal (2016) tells the stories of three men decades apart each dealing with the devastating loss of a wife.

Martel lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, with his wife, also a writer, and their four children all under the age of about eight.

Have a splendid Monday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.