“HOW DO YOU PICTURE Life of Pi?” This was the question that Books posed almost two years ago, launching an international competition, in conjunction with the publisher Canongate, to find an illustrator for Yann Martel’s Booker prizewinning novel.

The answers came in their hundreds. Artists – amateur and professional, Welsh and Filipino – spilt oceans of ink and paint on radically different visualisations of the same story: an Indian boy, Pi, gets shipwrecked in a lifeboat on the Pacific, with only a 450lb Bengal tiger named Richard Parker for company. Martel’s scenes were recreated in bright, digitally rendered manga, intricate, busy pen-and-ink drawings, serene linocuts and scratchy, weathered acrylics.

After a spirited two-hour conference call, the judges – Martel himself, Jamie Byng, of Canongate, whose idea the competition was, the artist Marc Quinn, The Timescartoonist Peter Brookes, the Literary Editor, Erica Wagner, and representatives from The Globe and Mail, Canada, and The Age, Melbourne – picked one artist whose vision for the book simply demanded to be seen: Tomislav Torjanac.

“I was taking a nap when Yann called to tell me I won,” the 35-year-old Croatian illustrator tells me in charmingly understated, carefully phrased English, from his home in the mountainside town of Orahovica. “It was a really pleasant surprise. I didn’t have any expectations really, because, as they say, expectations are simply preconceived disappointments.”

Torjanac’s rich, digitally enhanced oil paintings had an immediate impact on Martel: “What really sold me on his style was its painterliness,” the Canadian author recalls. “It was his colours, the brilliance of his compositions, the swirls of paint – and his idea to show everything from Pi’s perspective. After all, it’s a first-person narrative – in the book I never describe Pi.”

If one flicks through the 40 images in the resplendent new hard-back edition, the decision to paint in the first person seems a stroke of genius. Viewed through Pi’s eyes, and without his own appearance to distract us, the events unfold with unnerving immediacy. All we see of Pi are his feet and his long-fingered hands (oddly similar to Martel’s own, according to his girlfriend, the author Alice Kuipers); hurling a lifebuoy, hauling aboard a turtle, holding a ball of tiger dung.

What inspired this unusual approach? The TV show M*A*S*H*, is Tojanac’s unexpected reply: “I remember that as a kid I saw an episode filmed entirely from the point of view of a wounded American soldier in Korea. All we could see were his hands, so maybe some of that stuck in my head.”

Everybody was happy with Torjanac’s vision; now they had to decide on the quotes that would be illustrated. Author and artist have not yet met (although they will soon, as they convene for an event in London and then a whirlwind book tour of the US) but they had several involved telephone conversations about the pacing of the book: “We did not want to overcrowd it,” Torjanac explains. “My aim was to fully complement the text without competing with it.” Once the scenes were decided, Martel had to let go: “It’s Tomislav’s work of art. He wouldn’t tell me, ‘Rewrite that quote, I don’t like it’, so I didn’t direct him in any way. Periodically I’d get an e-mail with an attachment, and I’d suddenly say, ‘Oh, wow . . .’ ” Torjanac’s illustrations emphasise a central theme of the novel: the primacy of the imagination. From painstakingly accurate renditions of the lifeboat and brutally realistic portrayals of its animal residents, the images veer into a more distorted, fanciful realm. In one early scene all the animals of Pi’s father’s zoo crowd around as if it is the viewer – not the creatures – who is the spectacle. Pi’s attempt to train Richard Parker is presented with pendants and stripes, as if a circus poster. The island that Pi chances upon looms out of the water in bright, weird, writhing green roots.

And the surreal final image brilliantly encapsulates the vital but slippery nature of storytelling. “I was trying to enter Pi’s head,” Torjanac says. “Some things are clearly from his imagination but some are halfway . . . I wanted to entangle things a bit more.”

Torjanac has illustrated books before, but this is his biggest – “in every sense”. When the excitement dies down he will return to his mysterious “personal project”, of which he will reveal nothing – in case expectations become disappointments. Martel has almost finished his next book, A 20th-Century Shirt – which will contain a novel and an essay, both about the Holocaust – and he is keeping one eye on Hollywood, where Life of Pi is about to be transformed into a movie (with a “stupendous” budget) by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the director of Amélie.

Torjanac and Martel are both delighted with the way the illustrated edition has turned out. But wasn’t Martel ever worried that the images might end up somehow fixing or limiting his novel?

“This book gives the story a rebirth. People read the text and get a certain idea – it might be different from mine. Then they see the illustrations, and they have an idea that is both different from mine and different from their own. All these ideas meet.”

Torjanac agrees: “When I was working on the book I was only the second link in the chain after Yann. It all comes down to the last link – the reader. It’s his interpretation that makes this book what it really is.”

Win tickets to Yann Martel and Tomislav Torjanac in discussion with Erica Wagner

Two years ago, The Times launched a competition to fi nd an artist to illustrate the bestselling Life of Pi. Croatian artist Tomislav Torjanac was chosen from thousands of entries. On September 25, at the Purcell Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, Erica Wagner, Literary Editor of The Times, talks to both writer and illustrator about this unique collaboration and unveils Tomislav’s striking imagery.

We have 20 pairs of tickets to this event to be won. For your chance to win, visit offersinthetimes.com/competition and answer this question: In the book, what is Pi short for; Pizzicato, Piscine or Piranha?

Please enter the code 6299 when prompted

If you’re not a winner, you can buy tickets to the event for £10 each. Call the box office on 0871 663 2500 to book.

Terms and conditions One entry per person. No purchase necessary. Competition open to UK residents aged 18 or over, except employees of News International, their families, agents or any other person connected with the competition. Closing date: midnight, September 18, 2007. There are 20 prizes, each consisting of two tickets to the Life of Pi interview with Yann Martel, Tomislav Torjanac and Erica Wagner at the Purcell Room, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1, on Tuesday, September 25 at 7.45pm. Prizes are subject to availability. Winners will be notifi ed by September 19, 2007. Standard Times competition terms and conditions, available onlie at www.offersinthetimes.com/competition, apply.

Yann Martel appears at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival on October 5 at 8:45pm. Call 01242 227979 www.cheltenhamfestivals.com

LIFE OF PI: THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION by Yann Martel & Tomislav Torjanac

Canongate, £25; 315pp

Buy for the special offer price of £20 (free p&p)

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