HERE IS THE NEW YORK TIMES COVERAGE OF YESTERDAY'S BIG LITERARY EVENT:
Novel About India Wins the Man Booker Prize
By VICTORIA YOUNG
Published: October 14, 2008
Aravind Adiga, 33, won the 40th Man Booker prize on Tuesday night for his debut novel, “The White Tiger,” a vivid exploration of India’s class struggle told through the story of a village boy who becomes the chauffeur to a rich man.

Alessia Pierdomenico/Reuters
Aravind Adiga after winning the 2008 Man Booker prize in London.

Mr. Adiga, who lives in Mumbai, was born in India and brought up partly in Australia. He studied at Columbia and Oxford and is a former correspondent for Time magazine in India. He is the second youngest writer to win the award; Ben Okri was 32 when he won for “The Famished Road” in 1991.
Michael Portillo, a former cabinet minister and the chairman of this year’s panel of judges, praised Mr. Adiga’s novel, saying that the short list had contained a series of “extraordinarily readable page-turners.” However, Mr. Adiga’s book had prevailed, he said, “because the judges felt that it shocked and entertained in equal measure.”
Mr. Adiga said his book was an “attempt to catch the voice of the men you meet as you travel through India — the voice of the colossal underclass.”
“This voice was not captured,” he added, “and I wanted to do so without sentimentality or portraying them as mirthless humorless weaklings as they are usually.”
When he accepted the award, Mr. Adiga dedicated it to “the people of New Delhi where I lived and where I wrote this book.” When asked what he would do with the money, Mr. Adiga joked, “The first thing I am going to do is to find a bank that I can actually put it in.”
Read the complete piece at the NYT online.
Footnote:
Free Press is going back to press for another 125,000 copies of the just-released trade paperback edition of THE WHITE TIGER. They started with 35,000 copies in print.