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”.

Accepting her award, Desai thanked her mother and father for their support, joking: “I’m Indian so I am going to thank my parents.”

She went on: “To my mother I owe a debt so profound and so great that this book feels as much hers as it does mine.

“It was written in her company and in her witness and in her kindness.

“I really owe her this book so enormously, there isn’t enough to convey it.”

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 said her mother would have to wait to hear the good news because she had gone to stay with family in a remote Tibetan settlement.

“She was so worried on my behalf that she gave me lots of advice and then went to visit my uncle, her brother, who lives in a Tibetan refugee settlement in a village which has no phone and no television, so she is probably sleeping very peacefully right now,” the author said.

She admitted to early doubts about following in her mother’s footsteps by becoming a writer.

“My mother told me never to be a writer because it’s such a difficult profession,” she said. “It was a long time before I started writing. But of course I grew up reading really hard all through my childhood, I wrote a few short stories when I went to college and after that I realised I was writing far too much to not do it.”

Desai divides her time between New York and New Delhi.

But she said: “I have an Indian passport and given what the political climate has been in the United States, I feel more and more Indian.”

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.

Sarah Waters had been the bookies’ favourite to win with her novel The Night Watch but Desai was the unanimous choice.

The winner was announced in a ceremony at London’s Guildhall, where earlier the judges’ two-hour deliberation was interrupted by a fire alarm.

Chairman of the judges, Hermione Lee, said: “I think her mother would be proud.

“It is clear to those of us who have read Anita Desai that Kiran Desai has learned from her mother’s work.

“Both write not just about India but about Indian communities in the world.

“The remarkable thing about Kiran Desai is that she is aware of her Anglo-Indian inheritance – of Naipaul and Narayan and Rushdie – but she does something pioneering. She seems to jump on from those traditions and create something which is absolutely of its own.

“The book is movingly strong in its humanity and I think that in the end is why it won.”

The win guarantees Desai a huge boost in sales.