Yann Martel

And you're right, they very much take it on as the number of times I've either received letters where people take on the metaphor of Richard Parker, people who have tumors,

Is the tiger to ruin it.

Richard Parker is the tiger that pies stuck with on a lifeboat.

You know, a tumor is Richard Parker.

A man who was in jail, you know, his setting was the lifeboat.

A woman who was kidnapped by a taxi driver in Belize and things done to her, the taxi driver was Richard Parker.

But even people who read things that I didn't notice, like for example, pies at sea for 227 days.

I chose that because it's a prime number.

It had to be a specific number of days because everyone who's been a castaway, I noticed in my research, eventually accounts for how many days they were at sea.

Just as a feat of survival, they always count the number of days.

So there had to be a number.

And art is about creating order.

It couldn't be a random number.

So it had to be a meaningful number.

So I said, I'll choose a prime number.

227, not that I'm a mathematician, but 227 is a prime number.

A prime number can only be divided by itself, one, or by one.

So, and I wanted that, that was a nice symbol because in the life of pie there's two stories.

I didn't want them to be divisible.

You take one story, the story with animals, or you take the other story, the story without animals.