Man Booker Prize winner Aravind Adiga of Mumbai poses with his book The White Tiger. (Stephen Hird/Reuters)

India's Aravind Adiga has won the Man Booker Prize for his debut novel, The White Tiger.

The annual £50,000 (about $100,000) award for the best novel in English by a writer from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth was named in London on Tuesday.

Adiga, 33, a first-time novelist based in Mumbai, studied at Columbia and Oxford and has been Indian correspondent for Time magazine. He is the third debut novelist to win, after DBC Pierre and Arundhati Roy.

The White Tiger is about the son of a rickshaw puller who becomes a successful entrepreneur.

The narrator, Balram Halwai lies, deceives and uses his sharp intelligence to ascend in Bangalore's business community, casting light on the seamy side of India's economic miracle.

Adiga "undertakes an extraordinary task — he gains and holds the attention of the reader for a hero who is a thoroughgoing villain," Michael Portillo, chair of the Man Booker judging panel, said.

"The book gains from dealing with pressing social issues and significant global developments with astonishing humour," he said in a prepared statement, emphasizing it was a difficult choice for the judges.

Portillo told the Guardian newspaper that "here was a book on the cutting edge, dealing with a different aspect of India, unfamiliar perhaps to many readers.

"What set it apart was its originality. The feeling was that this was new territory."

Six novels, from writers in Australia, Ireland, India and the U.K., were nominated to a short list.

The other nominees were:

• The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry.
• Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh.
• The Clothes on their Backs by Linda Grant.
• The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher.
• A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz.

Each of the shortlisted authors receives $5,000 and a designer-bound edition of his or her novel.

Last year's winner was Anne Enright for her novel The Gathering.

The Man Booker, created in 1969, is considered one of the world's most prestigious awards for literature, and winning it means thousands in sales for the author.