Inprint, Houston’s premier literary arts nonprofit organization, presents Booker Prize-winning novelist Yann Martel on Monday, April 27, 2026, 7:30 pm, at the Alley Theatre, as part of the 2025/2026 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series. Martel will read from and discuss his new novel Son of Nobody, followed by an on-stage conversation and a book signing in the lobby. General admission tickets are $5. Free tickets for students and senior citizens are available upon request. Books will be on sale at a discount at the event through Brazos Bookstore. For tickets and details, visit the Inprint website at inprint.org.

Yann Martel is the celebrated Canadian author of Life of Pi, a Booker Prize-winning international bestseller made into an Academy Award-winning film and successful Broadway play. Born in Salamanca, Spain, Martel grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska, and Victoria, British Columbia, and, through his parents’ time in the Canadian Foreign Service, was also raised in Costa Rica, Paris, Madrid, and Mexico City. After studying philosophy in college, he worked at odd jobs—tree-planter, dishwasher, security guard—while establishing himself as a writer. Known for exploring themes of interpretation, identity, and storytelling, Martel is also the author of the novels Self, Beatrice and Virgil, and The High Mountains of Portugal, as well as the acclaimed short story collection The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios.

In Houston, Martel will share his new novel Son of Nobody, described as a brilliant retelling of the Trojan War from the perspectives of an ancient soldier and a modern scholar. Praised by Booklist in a starred review as “original, thought-provoking, and utterly absorbing,” the novel reimagines classical antiquity via a new legend composed by Martel: The Psoad, an epic in free verse that follows a goatherd’s son, Psoas of Midea, who leaves his wife and family to fight at Troy. The poem is lost, until a Canadian academic, who has left his own wife and daughter behind to study at Oxford, discovers it thirty centuries later—leading him to grapple with questions of ambition, family, and responsibility. Told through the scholar’s translation of this imagined ancient epic and his modern footnotes, Son of Nobody is “a powerful meditation on life, death, and the vanity of human wishes, all illustrated by a poem that would do Homer proud” (Kirkus starred review).

Since 1980, the Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series has featured more than 400 of the world’s great writers from 40 countries, including winners of 13 Nobel Prizes, 74 Pulitzer Prizes, 71 National Book Awards, and 19 Booker Prizes, as well as 23 U.S. Poets Laureate. The series and Inprint receive generous underwriting support from The Brown Foundation, The Jerry C. Dearing Family Foundation, Houston Endowment, The City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, and the Texas Commission on the Arts. The series is presented in association with Brazos Bookstore and the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. Special thanks to Winpark.

For more information, visit inprint.org or call 713.521.2026.