Tiger burns so bright for Booker winner Adiga

Adiga, at 33 the second youngest victor in Booker history, said living in Britain, America and Australia had helped him understand the Indian underclass whose lives he chronicles. "I remember what it was like to be completely cut off," he said.

The White Tiger is the story of Balram Halwai, the son of a tubercular rickshaw driver who escapes grinding poverty in the countryside by moving to the city and becoming a chauffeur. Balram goes on to entrepreneurial success on the back of a murder.

Speaking after his victory at the Guildhall last night, Adiga said India's urban immigrants reminded him of his own experience overseas.

"These people getting off the train in New Delhi and seeing these giant flyovers and cars are as lost as I as when I arrived in New York," he said. People he had met as a journalist for Time magazine and British papers had strongly influenced the book.

Most significantly, an angry rickshaw driver once told Adiga that the journalist might well listen to his story but would go away and immediately forget him. Far from forgetting, it was these people whose lives were told in his novel. "It got me thinking about India in a new way," he said. The common culture of rich and poor had been eroded and class difference was contributing to the growth of, for example, terrorism.

"Class is one of the big dividers between the better off and the worse off. It doesn't seem to be what most people think literature should be about, but to me it's the most pressing thing." Although described by some as "angry," Adiga said the novel was "meant to be funny as well".

Michael Portillo, the former MP and chairman of judges, described the novel as like Macbeth with "a delicious twist". He said it had blown his socks off.

Adiga was born in Madras but now lives in Mumbai. He studied English literature at Columbia and Oxford universities. He is the fourth Indian-born writer to win after Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai. He beat Sebastian Barry, who was the bookies' favourite, another Indian Amitav Ghosh, Australian Steve Toltz and London-based authors Philip Hensher and Linda Grant.