When Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger won last year’s Man Booker Prize, it provoked both celebration and consternation in his native India. The tale of Balram, the son of a rickshaw-puller, who moves to Delhi to become a rich man’s chauffeur, the novel highlighted the gulf between the nation’s new-found economic power and its enduring poverty. Born in Madras in 1974, Adiga was educated in India and Australia. After studying in the US and the UK, he worked as a journalist. He lives in Mumbai.

What books are currently on your bedside table?
Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice; Chekhov’s plays; the poems of Walt Whitman; Balzac’s Old Goriot.