Does winning a major award like the Booker boost sales? Well, that depends. Are you Canadian? Emma Donoghue this year, and Yann Martel overall are the big winners. In Canada popular wisdom seems to hold that only the Giller has this bump effect (here’s me talking about just that). BookNet Canada, can you confirm?

Last year it was Hilary Mantel, who won the £50,000 Man Booker Prize for her historical novel Wolf Hall, which examines the life of Thomas Cromwell, an advisor to Henry VIII.

But does winning the Booker guarantee an author a boom in sales? Here at the Datablog we’ve pulled together Nielsen BookScan’s sales figures of all 43 winners of the title since its inception in 1969 (the prize was a tie in 1974 and again in 1992).

Nielsen’s data runs from 1998 onwards, so sales of older books aren’t directly comparable, but the runaway winner of recent years is Life of Pi by Yann Martel, which won in 2002 and has taken over £9m and sold 1.3m copies so far, more than twice as many as Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things in second place.