His paternal grandfather was K. Suryanarayana Adiga, former chairman of Karnataka Bank,[6][7] and maternal great-grandfather, U. Rama Rao, was a popular medical practitioner and Congress politician from Madras.

[8] Adiga grew up in Mangalore and studied at Canara High School and later at St. Aloysius College, Mangaluru, where he completed his SSLC in 1990.

[18][19] He is the fourth Indian-born author to win the prize, after Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and Kiran Desai.

[20] Propelled mainly by the Booker Prize win, The White Tiger's Indian hardcover edition sold more than 200,000 copies.

USA Today called it "one of the most powerful books I've read in decades", comparing it to Richard Wright's Native Son and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

[22] The Washington Post called it: "[a] blistering description of the inner workings of India's corrupt upper class [...] fresh, funny, different.