The Hindu : Front Page : Kiran Desai wins Booker Prize

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Thursday, Oct 12, 2006
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Kiran Desai wins Booker Prize

Hasan Suroor

The Inheritance of Losswasthe unanimous choice of judges

TRIUMPH AND JOY: Man Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai proudly holds the book that brought her the honour at the Guildhall in London on Tuesday. — PHOTO: AP

LONDON: Starting off as a rank outsider, Kiran Desai on Tuesday caught literary punters by surprise when she overtook Arundhati Roy to become the youngest woman writer to walk away with the £50,000 (over Rs. 42 lakh) Man Booker Prize for her second novel, The Inheritance Of Loss, an unfashionably brooding take on globalisation and multicultural identities.

Kiran Desai, 35, is the third Indian to win a Booker — arguably one of the most important literary honours of the English-speaking world — after Salman Rushdie and Ms. Roy. The latter was 36 when she got the prize in 1997 for The God of Small Things.

The shadow of Anita Desai, her famous mother who was shortlisted three times but never won, hovered all evening and the first question popped at "daughter" Desai after being declared a winner was inevitably about her mother's reaction.

"She is in a village in India where there is no TV or telephone ... She's probably sleeping very peacefully," Kiran said, adding that she owed a huge debt to her mother. Her prize-winning novel, Kiran said, was as much "hers as it is mine." "It feels like a family endeavour," she told the BBC.

Kiran beat five contenders — Hisham Matar, Kate Grenville, M.J. Hyland, Edward St. Aubyn and Sarah Waters — to emerge as the unanimous choice of judges, a rare occurrence in the history of the Booker Prize. Hermione Lee, academic and literary critic who chaired the jury, stressed that the choice was "not a compromise." She hailed The Inheritance Of Loss as a "magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom."

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