Kiran Desai Biography

Booker prize winner Kiran Desai was born in India on September 3, 1971. She did her education in Delhi and England, before moving to the United States to study creative writing, and wrote the novel Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard during this period.
Her mother is the equally famous author Anita Desai, whose three books have been short listed for the Booker Prize (Clear Light of Day in 1980, In Custody in 1984 and Fasting, Feasting in 1999. Her maternal grandmother was of German descent, while her grandfather was a refugee from Bangladesh.

Her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, published in 1998, received widespread fame and praise. It won the Betty Trask Award for the best new novel by citizens of the Commonwealth of Nations under the age of 35.

Her second book, The Inheritance of Loss published in 2006 won the 2006 Man Booker Prize. The book is set partly in India and partly in the USA. In her own words, the book “tries to capture what it means to live between East and West and what it means to be an immigrant.”