YANN MARTEL, the Canadian author who won this year’s Booker Prize with a novel about a boy and a tiger, was drawn yesterday into a row about the plagiarism of fictional ideas.

His book, Life of Pi, tells the story of a shipwrecked Indian teenager who survives in a lifeboat with a royal Bengal tiger. The 39-year-old Montreal-based writer does not deny that the germ of the idea for the book came from a novella, Max and the Cats, published more than 20 years ago in Brazil. Max is a Jewish boy who shares a lifeboat with a black panther.

“I saw a premise that I liked and I told my own story with it,” said Martel, who is currently teaching a course at Berlin University on “the animal in Western literature”.

Martel’s open acknowledgement of his literary debt to Max’s author, Moacyr Scliar, has done little to placate literary circles in Brazil, and it has reopened the debate about what exactly constitutes plagiarism.

Scliar has not yet read Martel’s book, but believes firmly that “an idea is intellectual property”. The 65-year-old doctor, who lives in Porto Allegre, has published 16 novels and many other works. He is regarded as a prominent figure in Latin American literature, above all for his writing on Jewish subjects.

“In a certain way I feel flattered that another writer considered my idea to be so good,” he said. “But on the other hand, he used that idea without consulting me or even informing me.”

Martel said that he read a review of Max and the Cats in 1990, after an English translation was published in paperback. That was the year that Martel, already an accomplished short story writer, started to earn a full-time living as a novelist. He was 27 and since graduating in philosophy had been surviving as a dishwasher, tree planter and security guard.

He denies, however, having read the Brazilian book, and it is the phrasing of the denial that has sparked such rage across the Atlantic. When he read the review, he said, “the effect on my imagination was like electric caffeine” because of its “perfect unity of time, action and place.” But to read the book itself would have been a step too far. “I didn’t really want to read it. Why put up with the gall? Why put up with a brilliant premise ruined by a lesser writer?” The assumption that Scliar could be an inferior writer has pricked Brazil’s national pride. The country feels that its literature is not properly acknowledged in North America or Europe.

The waters have been further muddied by Martel’s reference to reading a New York Times review of the book by John Updike, the venerable American novelist. No trace can be found of this review.

The suspicion in Brazil is that Martel read the book but does not want to say so. “My publishers are consulting their lawyers and examining legal options,” Scliar said.

Martel’s British agent, Derek Johns of A.P. Watt, did not return calls yesterday. But another leading agent in London said: “I think it’s a storm in a teacup. After all, people argue that there are only seven basic stories to tell in fiction.”

Certainly the debate is far from clear-cut on borrowing ideas rather than simply copying words. The plagiarism dilemma has taken on new dimensions in a globalised book market. Thus J.K. Rowling, once falsely accused of stealing the idea of Harry Potter from an American author, is now threatening to sue a Russian publisher for plagiarism after her recent legal victory in China over a bogus Harry Potter novel.

The Kennedy biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin, who complained that her work was plagiarised by the writer Joe McGinniss, has in turn been accused of taking passages from other books. The late narrative historian Stephen Ambrose was accused of lifting chunks from other works.

Non-fiction writers frequently blame the glitches of word processing: text is transferred from one file to another and quotation marks disappear. Ambrose employed several research assistants, multiplying the possibilities of accidental plagiarism.

Novelists, and even poets, are in a more complex position. Since Horace’s Art of Poetry there has been an argument that writers should follow their masters, using and extending previously explored metaphors. Great writers have often used familiar plots, characters and ideas to transcend the original. The critic Harold Bloom calls the process “transformative improvement”.

Martel’s and Scliar’s books are certainly quite different, despite the semblance of borrowing. The key difference is already apparent in the choice of wild cat in the lifeboat. Scliar’s black panther is deliberately chosen: its darkness is a conscious reference to Nazism and, by extension, Brazil’s military dictatorship (from 1964 to 1985). Martel’s cat has a quite different function; his book is about the nature of “the other” rather than a work with political subtexts.

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