Yann Martel retells the Iliad from a common soldier's view
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- Yann Martel publishes Son of Nobody, a reimagining of the Iliad that centers Psoas, an unknown common soldier, with the poem printed in full alongside a present-day Oxford researcher named Harlow Donne whose story — including a marriage breakdown and his bond with his young daughter Helen — unfolds in digressive, often humorous footnotes.
- Martel says he first picked up Homer's Iliad in his 50s on the recommendation of his wife, writer Alice Kuipers, expecting it to be 'venerable and kind of boring' and instead being gripped by its action and its focus on what he calls the 'Bill Gateses and the Jeffrey Epsteins' of the ancient world.
- Son of Nobody is self-described by Martel as 'pseudo-Homerica' and as a 'book about the failure of anger management,' built on the rhythm and metre of Homer rather than the free verse of Stephen Mitchell's translation that first drew him in.
- Life of Pi, Martel's 2002 Booker winner about a shipwrecked boy and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, is the work he expected to 'sink' because it defended zoos and took religion seriously without irony, but instead became a global hit later adapted by Ang Lee — whose film Martel says lost something by over-investing in special effects.
- Martel is already at work on his next project, a box of 52 small booklets about his mother, who has Alzheimer's and lives in a care facility, written over the six weeks he spent waiting for his editor's notes on Son of Nobody.
Why it matters: Martel is betting that the literary world still has appetite for an author's most audacious move yet — composing an original Homeric-style poem in full — and pairing it with a contemporary footnote narrative about grief and parenthood. For readers, the payoff is a Trojan War that finally gives voice to the rank-and-file dead rather than the warring elites.
