Kiran Desai wins Man Booker prize

Indian writer Kiran Desai succeeded where her mother failed by winning the £50,000 (€73,000) Man Booker Prize For Fiction with her novel The Inheritance of Loss. The 35-year-old also became the youngest ever female winner in the history of the prestigious award. Desai said she owed a “profound and great” debt to her mother, fellow novelist Anita Desai, who was nominated for the prize three times but always lost out.

The judges hailed The Inheritance of Loss as “a magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness”. The Inheritance of Loss tells parallel stories set in post colonial India and the US. In the foothills of the Himalayas, a Cambridge-educated Indian judge lives out a reclusive retirement until his orphaned teenage granddaughter comes to stay. His existence eventually comes under threat from Nepali insurgents. Meanwhile his cook’s son, who has travelled to America to seek his fortune, ekes out a miserable existence as an illegal immigrant in New York restaurant kitchens.

Desai herself lived in India until the age of 15, when she moved to England to continue her education. From there she moved to the US, where she is currently a student on Columbia University’s Creative Writing Course. Desai divides her time between New York and New Delhi. This is her second novel and it took eight years to complete. Her debut, Hullabaloo in The Guava Orchard, was published in 1998 and won the Betty Trask Award.

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