Adiga, Aravind, << ah DEE gah, AHR uh vihnd >> (1974-…), an Indian author, won the 2008 Man Booker Prize for his novel The White Tiger (2008). The prize, now called the Booker Prize , is the most important literary award in the United Kingdom.
The White Tiger is narrated by Balram Halwai, an Indian born into extreme poverty who works his way up to a life of wealth as a respected businessman in Bangalore (now Bengaluru ). Balram grows up in a poor village in rural India. He is hired as a driver for the village’s richest man and eventually murders his employer as the first step toward freeing himself from a life of poverty. Balram’s dark, humorous, and even nasty story is fascinating in its treatment of the economic injustices Adiga sees in the class system in India and the corruption of the modern, booming Indian economy. A major theme in the novel is the conflict between Balram’s loyalty to his rural family and his deeply compromised personal ambition.
Last Man in Tower (2011), Adiga’s second novel, is a story of class conflict set in modern Mumbai , India’s largest city. Selection Day (2016), his third novel, centers on two young brothers growing up in a Mumbai slum who are raised by their abusive father to become cricket stars.
Adiga was born on Oct. 23, 1974, in Madras (now Chennai ), India. During the early 1990’s, he lived for several years in Australia and attended high school there. Adiga graduated from Columbia University in the United States in 1997 with a degree in English literature and then studied at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. He worked as a correspondent for Time magazine for three years and then became a free-lance journalist. The White Tiger was Adiga’s first published book. Between the Assassinations, also published in 2008, is a collection of short stories.
