KIRAN DESAI

Indian novelist Kiran Desai won the Booker Prize on Oct 10, 2006 and become the youngest woman ever to capture one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards.


She won the £50,000 prize at her first attemp for her sweeping novel The Inheritance of Loss, while her mother Anita Desai was three times shortlisted for the Booker.
Right till the end, Desai had been rated a rank outsider and 5th to win on the six-name Booker shortlist.

The extraordinary achievement makes the 35-year-old Desai the youngest woman ever to win the Booker, after nine years a distinction previously enjoyed by Arundhati Roy.

“The debt I owe my mother is so profound that I feel the book is hers as much as mine,” she told the distinguished gathering.

Desai engagingly admitted that The Inheritance of Loss, an exploration of post-colonial chaos and despair in Kalimpong and Manhattan that took her eight years to write, did revolve around the same initial storyline as Anita’s novel Fire on the Mountain (1977).

Water Resources Devt. In IIT Roorkee-India.