Yann Martel

Well, I was curious in a different way than I am today.

Each of my books answers a question.

So I grew up in a completely secular household.

My parents are children of something called the Quiet Revolution.

I'm originally from Quebec, French Canada.

French is my mother tongue, but I always went to school in English.

And so my parents, until the 1960s, Quebec was a terrible Catholic place.

It was Catholicism at its worst.

Nothing more hateful sometimes than Christian love.

It was patriarchal, sexist, homophobic.

It was terrible.

It was a terrible...

Terrible place to grow up.

Nothing was happening.

It was the Stone Age.

And suddenly in the 60s, thanks to many things, sexual revolution, the Beatles, all that, suddenly the province as a single person got up and threw off the shackles of Catholicism.

And it went to being from the most backward place in Canada to being the most progressive.

My parents were children of that, so they were fiercely anti-clerical.

Fiercely, fiercely anti-clerical, anti-religious.

So I grew up like that, and instead, there were art, artists.