'I Am Envious of Writers Who Are in India': Kiran Desai
“I am envious of writers who are in India”: Kiran Desai, the Man Booker Prize, and Indian Diasporic Writing Somdatta Mandal I: The Man Booker Prize: On the 10th of October 2006, defeating the five other novelists who made it to the short list, Kiran Desai won the UK’s leading literary award, the Man Booker Prize, for her novel, The Inheritance of Loss. Apart from being the youngest woman writer to receive this prize, she is the third writer of Indian origin – after Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy-- to win this prestigious award and also simultaneously catapult Indian writing in English to further worldwide fame as a special genre of writing. It is ironic that a book titled The Inheritance of Loss earned her 50,000 pound sterling and became a sort of redemption for the Desais, whom Salman Rushdie calls the “first dynasty of modern Indian fiction.” Although her mother Anita Desai had been short-listed for the Booker prize thrice -- Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984), and Fasting, Feasting (1999), with the prize then simply called the Booker and not the Man Booker as it is being called since 2002, she failed to receive the prize. It is further ironical that Inheritance, Kiran Desai’s second novel, was according to the author herself, much harder to write than her debut novel Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, taking "seven years of my being determinedly isolated." It almost didn't get published in England. "The British said it didn't work,” she admitted, and nearly ten publishing houses rejected it until Hamish Hamilton bought it.
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