Kolkata: There is a debt that Kiran Desai, winner of the Man Booker Prize for 2006, owes her father — the gift of a free-flowing language.

"As an immigrant, language tends to get curbed in a way, becoming bland and more formal," Ms. Desai said here on Saturday. It was during the visits that she paid to her father who was still living in India that she became conscious of this loss, becoming influenced by her father who was able to talk and use language without being self-conscious.

In the city for a reading session organised by Penguin Books India and Oxford Bookstores, Kolkata, Ms. Desai read extracts from her award-winning book, `The Inheritance of Loss', and later interacted with prominent author Amit Chaudhuri as well as those assembled about her life and work.

Later in the evening, Ms. Desai was joined by Thomas Keneally, Australian writer and fellow Booker Prize winner, who had won the award in 1982 for his novel `Schindler's Ark.'

For an author whose first novel — `Hullabaloo in a Guava Orchard' — was by her own confession, the `inevitable product' of the creative writing classes that she attended, Ms. Desai is wary of the effect these workshops might have on writing. "In my first book, the honesty was compromised ... and the sad, dark things could not be looked at directly," she said.

"The thoughts [in that book] were curbed, the sentences sanitised and it was hard to disappear in those darker, deeper, weirder, more eccentric spaces where good literature exists."

When quizzed by Mr. Chaudhuri on whether the tendency in modern day America to get rid of the semi colon (punctuation mark) robbed writing of its muddiness, quirkiness and idiosyncrasy, Ms. Desai said it was indeed a worrying trend.

Ms. Desai, who is influenced by literary giants like V.S. Naipaul, Italo Calvino and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, admitted that there are authors closer home who have also left their mark on her. "I think Ruskin Bond and R.K. Narayan taught us how to be Indian... in the sweetest and gentlest way possible."

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