Max e os Felinos (Max and the Cats) influenced Life of Pi

In the official Author’s Note included at the very front of Life of Pi, Martel explicitly names the author. He wrote that his book owed its "spark of life" to the Brazilian writer Moacyr Scliar. The core influence is the structural high-concept premise: a young refugee survives a shipwreck and is forced to share a tiny lifeboat on the open ocean with a dangerous apex predator.