Almost 11 years after Arundhati Roy won the Bookers for her The God Of Small Things, author Aravinda Adiga won the prestigious Man Booker prize for his novel, The White Tiger on October 14, 2008, at an awards ceremony at Guildhall, London. Educated in India and Australia, Adiga at 33 is the youngest writer to win the Booker. Adiga’s The White Tiger deals with protagonist Balram Halwai's journey from darkness of village life to the light of entrepreneurial success.

The other Indian and a tough contender was Amitav Ghosh (The Sea of Poppies.) Ghosh's Sea of Poppies is set against the backdrop of the opium trade in eastern India and tales of sailors, convicts and indentured labourers on board the Ibis, a ship headed to Mauritius in 1838. Adiga was also shortlisted for this year's John Llewellyn Rhys prize

The 2008 Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, a half-British French novelist and philosopher, on October 9, 2008. The Swedish Academy said it had awarded Le Clézio the prize of 10 million Swedish kroner (£790,000) because he was an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, an explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation".

His best-known book, written in 1980, is Desert, which contrasts the ugliness and ignorance of Europe, as experienced by immigrants, with the simple nobility of a lost Tuareg civilisation in the Sahara, destroyed by French colonialism.

Le Clézio received much attention with his first novel, Le procès-verbal (1963; The Interrogation, 1964). His debut novel was the first in a series of descriptions of crisis, which includes the short story collection La fièvre (1965; Fever, 1966) and Le déluge 1966; The Flood, 1967), in which he points out the trouble and fear reigning in the major Western cities.

Beginning with the 1962 short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn devoted himself to describing what he called the human "meat grinder" that had caught him along with millions of other Soviet citizens: capricious arrests, often for trifling and seemingly absurd reasons, followed by sentences to slave labor camps where cold, starvation and punishing work crushed inmates physically and spiritually. His Gulag Archipelago trilogy of the 1970s shocked readers by describing the savagery of the Soviet state under the dictator Josef Stalin.

Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter, died on Christmas Eve in 2008, aged 78.

Pinter had a number of awards bestowed on him during a long and distinguished career, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. In its citation, the Nobel academy said Pinter was "generally seen as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century" and declared him to be an author "who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms".

He was awarded a CBE in 1966, the German Shakespeare Prize in 1970, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1973 and the David Cohen British Literature Prize in 1995. He was also awarded a number of honorary degrees.

Japan's 86 year old Buddhist nun, Jakucho Setouchi, is reaching out to a new audience by writing a mobile phone novel.

A prolific writer and translator of 11th century epic romance The Tale of Genji, is latching on to a publishing revolution -- short works of fiction distributed piecemeal by cellphone often become best-sellers in book form.

The story, entitled Tomorrow's Rainbow, is about a high school girl who is deeply hurt by her parents' divorce but finds the love of her life in a boy named Hikaru.

"At this age, there are few things that interest me. But it was the first time I had written a cellphone novel, and it was exciting," Setouchi was quoted by a local newspaper as saying. She decided to try the new genre when she was tapped to serve as honorary chairperson for a mobile phone novel award.