NP - Booker Prize Plagerist?

[David Morris]

http://books.guardian.co.uk/bookerprize2002/story/0,12350,836092,00.html

Yann Martel, the Canadian author and winner of this year's Booker prize has
become entangled in a row over the plagiarism of fictional ideas after freely
admitting the inspiration for his prize-winning novel came from another
writer's work. 

In the Life of Pi, Martel, 39, tells the story of a shipwrecked Indian teenager
who ends up in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger after the ship taking him and his
family to Canada sinks. 

It is this similarity to a story by one of Brazil's most respected authors,
Moacyr Scliar, which has started the row over how much of the idea Martel
"borrowed" from Scliar's Max and the Cats, in which a teenage Jewish boy is
adrift in a boat with a panther after a shipwreck. 

Although Martel readily credits the story by Scliar, a doctor, as the
inspiration for his novel, he says he only read a review of the book. 

"I saw a premise that I liked and I told my own story with it," Martel said on
Wednesday from Berlin, where he is teaching a five-month university course on
animals in literature. "I don't feel I've done something dishonest." 

Scliar, 65, who is descended from a family of Jewish immigrants and lives in
Porto Allegre, said he considered the idea his "intellectual property" and that
his publishers are considering legal action. 



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