Kiran Desai

Kiran Desai Biography

Kiran Desai is an Indian author and winner of Man Booker Prize in the year 2006. She won the award for her novel The Inheritance of Loss. She also won the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award for the same book. She is the daughter of noted Indian writer, Anita Desai who has been shortlisted three times for Booker prize in fiction category. Her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, was published in 1998.

Kiran Desai was born on 3 September 1971. She was born in Chandigarh as the daughter of noted writer, Anita Desai and Ashvin Desai, the director of a computer software company and author of the book: Between Eternities: Ideas on Life and The Cosmos. She has three siblings. She spent the early years of her life in Pune and Mumbai. Her schooling was done at Cathedral and John Connon School. She left India when she was 14, lived with mother for a year in England and then moved to US. She studied she studied creative writing at Bennington College, Hollins University and Columbia University. Now she is in relationship with Nobel Prize winner, Orhan Pamuk. Now Kiran is a permanent resident of US.

As a writer, her first novel was published in the year 1998. The work, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard won acclamations and good comments from notable figures like Salman Rushdie. The book received won the Betty Trask Award, for young writers of age below 35. Her second book, The Inheritance of Loss, (2006) was well received worldwide and it won Man Booker prize as well. Most recently in 2013, she was awarded with Berlin Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin in the year 2013.

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Updated: March 20, 2014