Idea for novel wasn't mine, admits Booker Prize winner

Yann Martel, the Canadian writer who won the Booker Prize last month for his tale of a shipwrecked boy trapped in a boat with a tiger, has credited another author with the idea behind the novel.

Martel, 39, has sailed into controversy over the inspiration he drew from a novella published over 20 years ago by one of Brazil's most respected authors, Moacyr Scliar.

Martel won the £50,000 Booker Prize, Britain's most prestigious book award, for Life of Pi, the story of an Indian teenager who ends up in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger after the ship taking him to Canada sinks.

Scliar's book Max and the Cats, which Martel says he read about in a review years before starting his book but never read himself, tells of a Jewish teenage boy who survives a shipwreck but has to share his lifeboat with a jaguar. "I saw a premise that I liked and I told my own story with it," Martel said on Wednesday in Berlin, where he is teaching a five-month university course on animals in literature. "I don't feel I've done something dishonest."

Scliar disagrees, saying he considers his idea "intellectual property" and that his publishers are weighing legal action. "I am not litigious, but I'm not the only owner of the book. My publishers are consulting their lawyers and examining legal options," Scliar said this week at his home in Porto Alegre, Brazil. "But I am not going to make this a crusade."

Scliar's book was published in Portuguese in Brazil in 1981 and an English translation was published in 1990.

Martel says his book is about "religion, faith and imagination". Scliar's book is considered a metaphor for Nazism and Brazil's 1964-85 military dictatorship.

Martel makes a nod to Scliar's influence at the start of his book, saying the Brazilian gave it "the spark of life".