1. Yann Martel
Author of
Life of Pi

2. BIOGRAPHY
Yann Martel was born in Spain in 1963 of peripatetic Canadian parents; he travelled a great deal internationally while he was growing up, because his parents worked for the Canadian Foreign Service. . His father was a diplomat as well as a recognized Quebecois poet. As a result of his father's job, Martel grew up in Alaska, British Columbia, Costa Rica, France, Ontario and Mexico. He has continued traveling as an adult, spending time in Iran, Turkey and India. After studying philosophy at Trent University and while doing various odd jobs—tree planting, dishwashing, working as a security guard—he began to write.

3. Biography Continued…
He is the prize-winning author of The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, a collection of short stories, and Self, a novel, both of them published internationally. He has been living from his writing since the age of 27. He divides his time between yoga, writing and volunteering in a palliative care unit. Yann Martel lives in Montreal. He will be writer in residence in Saskatoon for the fall of 2003.
Life of Pi started with six months in India visiting mosques, temples, churches and zoos, before Martel took a year to read religious texts and castaway stories.
Martel then got down to writing
- which took another two years.

4. On Faith
"Fanatics do not have faith - they have belief. With faith you let go. You trust. Whereas with belief you cling." Then the novelist comes through. "One of the things I discovered, reading the founding texts of Islam, Christianity, Hinduism - a good religion works like a good novel: it makes you suspend your disbelief."
Martel during an interview with The Guardian

5. Interview With Yann Martel
Take notes on Martel’s thoughts on Religious Extremism, Faith, Fear and Hope.
He also speaks of his novel’s comparison with “Max and the Cats”. What are his thoughts on that?

8. Consider…
Yann Martel said in an interview, “The theme of this novel can be summarized in three lines. Life is a story. You can choose your story. And a story with an imaginative overlay is the better story.”
What do you think this means?