Kiran Desai

Author

Kiran Desai is an Indian-American novelist who won the Man Booker Prize in 2006 for her second novel The Inheritance of Loss, becoming one of the youngest women to receive the award. Born in New Delhi in 1971, she is the daughter of the acclaimed novelist Anita Desai. She grew up in India, moved to England at fourteen, and later studied... Creative Writing at Bennington College, Hollins University, and Columbia University in the United States. Her debut novel Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, a whimsical fable about a young man who escapes his family by living in a tree, won the Betty Trask Award and announced an exuberant new voice in Indian fiction. The Inheritance of Loss, set in the mid-1980s in the northeast Indian Himalayas and New York City, explores globalisation, immigration, postcolonial identity, and the gap between aspiration and reality with extraordinary emotional depth and linguistic beauty. Though she has published only two novels, both have been widely translated and studied, and her influence on contemporary Indian writing in English is significant. Her audiobooks and books offer listeners and readers fiction of remarkable ambition and beauty, illuminating the complexities of life between cultures with compassion and wit. Read more Show less