Outsider Aravind Adiga wins Booker

First Salman Rushdie failed to make the shortlist (despite being tipped to win). Now a rank outsider, 33-year-old Aravind Adiga, a first-time author from India, has beaten off five more seasoned contenders to win this year's £50,000 Man Booker Prize for his novel The White Tiger, which was praised by the judges for presenting the "dark side of India" and likened to Shakespeare's Macbeth "with a delicious twist".

Adiga, who was born in Madras but studied at Oxford, becomes the second-youngest writer in the 40 years of the competition. He was also the second novelist of Indian origin to win with a debut novel – as Arundhati Roy did in 1997 with The God Of Small Things.

The White Tiger revolves around the ascent of a taxi-driver-turned-entrepreneur who rises from the darkness of Indian village life to the glamour and excess of boom-time India.

Accepting his award, Adiga said the work came out of his journalistic assignments – he writes for US magazine Time and the Independent - which took him traveling across India to its northern regions. He said that the book's main character was partly inspired by a rickshaw-puller he met, who angrily said to him, 'You've listened to me, but when you go back to Delhi, you'll forget about me'. "I did not forget about him," said Adiga.

Michael Portillo, the former Tory minister who chaired the panel of judges, said their decision was "emotionally draining" because they initially split their votes between Adiga and one other on the shortlist of six, whose name he didn't reveal.

The final selection meeting, he said a touch dramatically, brought all of the male judges to tears. Praising the book, he said of the main character: "He is a hero who is a thorough-going villain. The story tells of the corruption that typifies Indian politics as the author sees it. It is an interesting insight into a country that is becoming more and more important in global affairs. It does follow the story of Macbeth's ambition realised through murder. There's a delicious twist."

Adiga was born in Madras in 1974 and partly raised in Australia. He studied at Columbia University in New York and then at Oxford. He is now based in Mumbai.

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