DBC Pierre Pierre was awarded the 2003 Booker Prize for fiction for Vernon God Little, his first novel, becoming the third Australian-born author to be so honored. After winning the Whitbread First Novel Award the same year, he became the first writer to receive a Booker and a Whitbread for the same book.

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.