Kiran Desai

Kiran Desai, born on September 3, 1971, in New Delhi, India, is an acclaimed Indian-born American author. She is the daughter of the renowned novelist Anita Desai. She spent her early years in Punjab and Mumbai, studying at the Cathedral and John Connon School. At the age of 14, she moved to England with her mother for a year before settling in the United States.

Kiran Desai pursued creative writing at Bennington College, graduating in 1993. She further honed her craft by earning two M.F.A.s—one from Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, and the other from Columbia University in New York City.

Kiran Desai's literary journey began with her first novel, 'Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard' (1998), which received wide critical acclaim and won the 1998 Betty Trask Prize. The novel tells the story of a young man in provincial India who abandons his post office job to live in a guava tree, making oracular pronouncements to locals.

Her second novel, 'The Inheritance of Loss' (2006), set in India in the mid-1980s, became an international bestseller. The novel interweaves the story of a Cambridge-educated Indian judge living out his retirement in Kalimpong, near the Himalayas, with his granddaughter, and the life of the judge’s cook’s son as he struggles to survive as an illegal immigrant in the United States.

This novel won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award.

Kiran Desai's narratives, crafted with layers of feeling, sagacity, and humaneness, go beyond borders, striking a chord with audiences of diverse backgrounds and times. Her tales cast a luminous glow on the complexities of human life with elegance, discernment, and empathy. Her works provide a keen, richly descriptive analysis of globalization, terrorism, and immigration.

Kiran Desai currently resides in New York City. She has been in a relationship with Turkish novelist, screenwriter, academic, and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, Orhan Pamuk.