Red Snapper advises us that Kiran Desai was awarded the MAN Booker Prize for her novel The Inheritance of Loss just moments ago. Here is the official press release:
Chair of the judges, Hermione Lee, made the announcement at the awards dinner at the Guildhall, London, which was broadcast live on the BBC 10 O’ Clock News. Harvey McGrath, Chairman of Man Group plc, presented Kiran Desai with a cheque for £50,000.
Hermione Lee comments,
“We are delighted to announce that the winner of the Man Booker Prize for 2006 is Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, a magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness. The winner was chosen, after a long, passionate and generous debate, from a shortlist of five other strong and original voices.”
Over and above her prize of £50,000, Kiran Desai is guaranteed a huge increase in sales and recognition worldwide. Each of the six shortlisted authors, including the winner, receives £2,500 and a designer-bound edition of their book.
The judging panel for the 2006 Man Booker Prize for Fiction is: Hermione Lee (Chair), biographer, academic and reviewer; Simon Armitage, poet and novelist; Candia McWilliam, award-winning novelist; critic Anthony Quinn; and actor Fiona Shaw.
The press release reminds us that Kiran Desai is 35 and the daughter of author Anita Desai. Also, according to the release, Kiran is currently a student in the creative writing program at Columbia. I’m sure her classmates aren’t intimidated! Salman Rushdie calls Kiran “a terrific writer,” which is more than he had to say about John Updike.
Seriously though: Warm and sepia-tinted congratulations to Kiran Desai and let’s all run out and read her book.
Here’s my review of The Inheritance of Loss.
Also a funny excerpt from her previous novel Hullabaloo.
I just ordered the book from Amazon. Just going to watch her interview on Newsnight coming up in five minutes. How exciting! As if Jabeen Akhtar in a tiger cage wasnt enough for one evening.
Correction to the press release – Kiran Desai was a student in the MFA program at Columbia back in ’96. I used to work with her at the Reserves desk at Butler Library. She’s one of the nicest and most humble people I’ve come across. Hullabaloo is such a fun book. People complained that it was too R.K. Narayan-esque but I say we need more playful, delightful, and sensitive work like hers. I haven’t finished The Inheritance of Loss yet …
This is a surprise…I’ve read the book, and though good, definitely did not think it was Booker-worthy. Multiculturalism in literary acknowledgment at play here?…Been a while (Arundhati Roy in ’97) since a-‘”Brownie” you’re doing heckuva job’-moment for the Chattering Classes…
hooray!! i’m so happy for Kiran Desai!! let the brown literary movement expand on and on and on…
I agree– even the shortlisting was a surprise. She’s not as good as Rushdie or Ondaatje. But don’t quote me on that 😉
Wow – is this Master P, Amardeep’s son, blogging already?
Yay, congrats to Kiran!
The book goes to the first position in my “to-read” queue.
Literary dad, literary son 🙂 P.S. New diaper, thanks. Use the Desitin this time, I think I have postcolonial rash.
Did Salman Rushdie call it when he included her work in Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing (1947-1997), an anthology that he edited with Elizabeth West back in 1997? In his introduction, he described Hullabaloo as a “highly original book … lush and intensely imagined” and went on to say “Kiran Desai is the daughter of Anita: her arrival establishes the first dynasty of modern Indian fiction. But she is very much her own writer, the newest of all these voices, and welcome proof that India’s encounter with the English language, far from proving abortive, continues to give birth to new children, endowed with lavish gifts.”
Desai waves the Indian flag proudly:
While y’all are reloading your Amazon queues, let me put in a good word for Tokyo Cancelled.
Awesome. Somebody give this baby a Booker Prize.
Thanks, but I’m not sure I’d beat Zadie for le youngest.
No worries. Zadie’s as yet unBookered.
Mmm… Zadie gives me colonial overhang.
Well, she was very gracious, humble and endearing in her interview, saying that her mother Anita Desai was too nervous on her behalf to attend the ceremony and was in a village somewhere in India away from TV or a telephone. Her mother’s advice was to wear a sari and no matter what happens, to just get on with writing the next day, because that is what matters. She said the prize money (£50,000) will come in handy because she has no health insurance, and that the novel came together incrementally, from quarter stories here, half stories there, another third of a story there, and that’s why it took eight years to write. She said that even though she has lived away from India for so long, she doesnt think about any issue without relating it to her home, and she managed to keep smiling, when I cringed, when the interviewer asked her how she managed to recreate ‘the smells and colours’ of India whilst living in New York. All we needed was to be asked how she recreated the taste of mangoes and it would have been perfect.
Well done Kiran.
I think you mean guavas 🙂
No! No Zadie bashing…the Smith is sacred.
As are both the Desais…leftist polemicism and eloquence never go unrewarded 🙂
Good for Kiran.
BTW, I just wanted to state that I wasn’t pseudonymously blogging using my son’s name. Someone else is “Puran.” Not that I mind (and I like “Desitin”)… I just wanted it to be clear.
Do i discern a trend towards new/younger writers at the Booker? Her mother has been nominated thrice but never could make it. I think her best chance was with In Custody , when she unfortunately lost to the other Anita’s rather mediocre Hotel du lac .
Can’t the offspring of a literary talent get any credit around here?
Only on the booker
The dude that wrote FukYoCouch is awarded my Booker Prize.
And so with Kiran Desai, another generation of British Indian women in their late twenties/early thrities grit their teeth and sigh with an inchoate sense of jealousy 😀
(I only know British Indian girls)
Hey, wouldnt it be funny if it was discovered that she’d plaigarised this shit hehehe
“THEOF” !
THE Intrepeter OF Maladies THE Inheritance OF Loss
Any more come to mind?
The India of Mangoes
The Mediator of Curry
The Tao of Pooh
The House of Blue Mangoes The Mistress of Spices The Tao of Steve
Hey Manish, are you taking notes? This could very well be what it’s like a few months after you own magnum opus comes out!
Damn. Sounds like it was more fun for judges than for anyone else. As far as I know, not since Monica’s stained dress have these particular adjectives been deployed together.
Which leads me to one of my pet peeves. Why are press-releases for book prizes always so sophomorically written? The typical Nobel citation is a minefield of mixed metaphors and dangling modifiers. There’s Harold Pinter, “who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms.”
The members of the Swedish Academy should be forced into one of oppression’s tight trousers and shot for crimes against enthusiasm.
THE Intrepeter OF Maladies THE Inheritance OF Loss THE Mistress OF Spices (nice Manish)
The Children of Midnight.
At least until some wiseguy editor changed it.
For first-time novelists, more likely crickets 🙂
the pungency of pickles the rotundity of the rasagollas
Or the famous trilogy: the charm of the choli, the prankishness of the pallu, the paranoia of purda
The Death of Vishnu! (Manil Suri)
The Buddha of Surburbia! (Hanif Kureishi)
It’s officially a freakin’ epidemic…
That sounds like some commenters here.
I know at least one author who’d disagree with you… I hear that she’s been getting used to the sound of crickets more recently though 😉
Like desi women stripping naked for PETA!
THE Torrents of Spring (Ernest Hemingway) THE End of Poverty (Jeffrey Sachs) and some stretches… … (Love in) THE Time of Cholera (Haroun and) THE Sea of Stories 🙂
guys, guys, guys – it s gotta be famous desi lady authors 🙂
Silly, delusional, self-centred broad. I’d like to see her tell that to the half of all indian children who are chronically malnourished.
Controversy!
DESI DORK,
I think taking her point out of context doesn’t do you any favours. She’s speaking figuratively of India’s identity in the world’s perception. No one can deny the demographic reality of the ‘Other India’ that exists and is constantly being denied by Time and Newsweek covers, but Desai was talking about the richness of our literary establishment.
In fact I wanna say something harsh to you, but I’m so keen to read The Inheritance of Loss and so excited that I’ve got a new Arundhati that your name pretty much says it all for you 🙂
Stop being jealous (even though we all are, a li’l bit) and have some brown pride! There’s nothing wrong with a bit once in a while 🙂
Um, half the novel is a jeremiad against globalization’s effects on poor Indians.
Congrats to Kiran! I liked the book, especially the storylines set in New York City. literarysafari, I’d love to hear your thoughts on IoL when are you done…
All joking aside with “THE ___ OF ___” – Any language specialists around?
In contemporary colloquial American English one would be more likely to hear “Vishnu’s Death” than “The Death of Vishnu.” Are book titles put in that form because it sounds more “literary” or is is a language or translation thing? It seems most of the titles mentioned were written in English anyway…
Anyone?
Contractions are informal. The … of … sounds more majestic, unless you want an informal ring (Lorenzo’s Oil).