The book also won the Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman Prize for comic literature at the Hay Festival in 2003, and earned the author a James Joyce Award from the Literary and Historical Society of University College Dublin.

[4] His father, once decorated as a Lancaster Bomber pilot in World War II, by then a scientific partner to Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman E. Borlaug, fell ill when Pierre was sixteen, and died three years later.

Pierre's permanent residency in Mexico ended at Reynosa on the United States-Mexican border in the middle of the night when he claims he was stopped trying to import a 6-litre sports car.

Pierre succeeded in crossing with the car but found his papers cancelled by the time he reached Mexico City some 18 hours later.

Pierre asserts that, of the following years, nine were spent in a drug-induced haze, culminating with a stay in Australia where he finally collapsed.

He described this period of his life in an interview given on the Australian television show Enough Rope with Andrew Denton in 2006: I was lucky enough to be in Australia at the time, having come back to try my luck.

Upon being notified of his victory, Pierre said that the money would go part way toward paying off the debts incurred in his 20s when psychological issues and drug abuse were driving forces.

It also picks up the threads he had intended to pursue in his ill-fated production of years earlier, centring on the wizards and witches of an Otomi culture in a remote valley in the Sierra Madre mountains of central Mexico.