Desai, Kiran

▪ 2008

born Sept. 3, 1971, New Delhi, India

 Kiran Desai's second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, was short-listed for the Orange Broadband Prize in 2007, a year after it was published. That it failed to win hardly detracted from its prior success; a year earlier the novel had won two major prizes—the Man Booker Prize in Britain and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award in the United States—and had become an international best seller. Desai, the youngest female writer to have won the Booker, was following in the footsteps of her mother, novelist Anita Desai, who had been short-listed three times (1980, 1984, 1999) for the Booker.

      Kiran Desai, one of four children, lived in India until age 15, after which the family moved to England and then to the U.S. She graduated from Bennington (Vt.) College in 1993 and later received two M.F.A.'s—one from Hollins University, Roanoke, Va., and the other from Columbia University, New York City.

      One of her early stories appeared in the collection Mirrorwork (1997), edited by Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West. In a 1999 interview, however, Desai explained that “I couldn't go to school and write at the same time. I couldn't write a novel in the writing-workshop environment.” She left Columbia for several years to write her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998), about a young man in provincial India who abandons an easy post-office job and begins living in a guava tree, where he makes oracular pronouncements to locals. Unaware that he knows of their lives from having read their mail, they hail him as a prophet. Although Desai considered her novel a comedy and saw elements of folklore in it, she was reluctant to categorize it. Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard drew wide critical praise and received a 1998 Betty Trask Prize from the British Society of Authors.

      While working on what would become her second novel, Desai lived a peripatetic life that took her from New York to Mexico and India. After more than seven years of work, she published The Inheritance of Loss. Set in India in the mid-1980s, the novel has at its centre a Cambridge-educated Indian judge who is living out his retirement in Kalimpong, near the Himalayas, with his granddaughter until their lives are disrupted when they are threatened by Nepalese insurgents. The novel also interweaves the story of the judge's cook's son as he struggles to survive as an illegal immigrant in the U.S.

      Critics hailed The Inheritance of Loss as a keen, richly descriptive analysis of globalization, terrorism, and immigration. Desai explained that she thought of the novel as “just a family story,” but “if you are a writer, seriously writing in India, even if you're writing about a family story, you are automatically writing about immigration, globalization.”

J.E. Luebering

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▪ Indian-American author

born Sept. 3, 1971, New Delhi, India

 

 Indian-born American author whose second novel, The Inheritance of Loss (2006), became an international best seller and won the 2006 Booker Prize.

      Kiran Desai—daughter of the novelist Anita Desai (Desai, Anita)—lived in India until age 15, after which her family moved to England and then to the United States. She graduated from Bennington (Vt.) College in 1993 and later received two M.F.A.'s—one from Hollins University, in Roanoke, Va., and the other from Columbia University, in New York City.

      Desai left Columbia for several years to write her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998), about a young man in provincial India who abandons an easy post office job and begins living in a guava tree, where he makes oracular pronouncements to locals. Unaware that he knows of their lives from having read their mail, they hail him as a prophet. Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard drew wide critical praise and received a 1998 Betty Trask Prize from the British Society of Authors.

      While working on what would become her second novel, Desai lived a peripatetic life that took her from New York to Mexico and India. After more than seven years of work, she published The Inheritance of Loss (2006). Set in India in the mid-1980s, the novel has at its centre a Cambridge-educated Indian judge living out his retirement in Kalimpong, near the Himalayas, with his granddaughter until their lives are disrupted by Nepalese insurgents. The novel also interweaves the story of the judge's cook's son as he struggles to survive as an illegal immigrant in the United States. The Inheritance of Loss was hailed by critics as a keen, richly descriptive analysis of globalization, terrorism, and immigration. When she received the Booker Prize for the novel in 2007, Desai became the youngest female writer to win the award.

J.E. Luebering

 

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