Aravind Adiga's "The White Tiger" Wins Booker Prize

• Indian debut novelist Aravind Adiga won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2008 for his work The White Tiger in London.


• The 33-year-old journalist tells the "story of two Indias" in his book, praised by Booker Prize judges' chairman Michael Portillo as "being in the tradition of Macbeth with a delicious twist."


• Adiga is the third first-time novelist to win the 50,000-pound ($86,000) Booker Prize, which is awarded each year for the best novel in the British Commonwealth and the Republic of Ireland.
• Some have accused Adiga, who lives in Mumbai, of painting a negative picture of modern India and its huge underclass. But Adiga said he wanted to write about all aspects of Indian society.
• "In India if you really want to get out and do a book you have to make a conscious effort to connect to people in every conceivable way, " he told the British Broadcasting Corp. after winning the prize.
• Adiga is the fourth Indian-born author to win the prize, and joins compatriots Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai. A fifth winner, V.S. Naipaul is of Indian ancestry.