Kiran Desai wins this year's Booker Prize for her novel "The Inheritance of Loss"

The £50,000 Booker prize is the world's most prestigious literary award for fiction.  The prize founded in 1969, rewards the best book of the year in English language by a writer from the UK, Ireland and the Commonwealth countries.  The award winning book is selected keeping in view the high quality of writing, story, characterization, the literary merit and how the writing touches the readers' nerves.  Besides conferring the prestige and honor on the author, the famous award tremendously impacts the sales of the book.

This year, out of the 119 submissions only 6 novels made up to the final short list.  The Booker prize is known for its careful and considered selection.  Commenting on this year's selection the chairperson of the judges, Hermione Lee, said, "It is a magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political astuteness… The winner was chosen after a long, passionate and generous debate… But it was absolutely not a compromise."

Kiran Desai is the youngest woman winner in Booker history, after another young Indian woman writer Arundhati Roy.  She was announced on Tuesday night (October 10, 2006) as the clear, unanimous choice of the judges for her second novel The Inheritance of Loss.

The novel deals with the story of an embittered judge who wants to retie in peace in his crumbling house in a small town Kalimpong in the Himalayas.  But his life turns upside down with the arrival of his orphaned granddaughter.  The book follows the lives the judge, the granddaughter, the cook and the cook's son Bijou who lives in New York.  Geographically the novel crisscrosses between the kitchens of New York, where Bijou is a migrant worker and the Gorkha insurgency in Kalimpong in the 1980s, capturing the nativist spite of both the regions.

Kiran's triumph sadly contrasts her novelist mother Anita's repeated failure to win the coveted award despite being short-listed three times.  In a remarkable display of filial devotion Kiran turned her mother almost a joint winner by acknowledging before the distinguished gathering at the award ceremony, "The debt I owe my mother is so profound that I feel the book is hers as much as mine."  Her nervous and thrice spurned mother avoided the glare and the stress of the award announcement by sequestering herself in a Tibetan refuge center in a small mountainous town in North-East India, cut off from all communication links.  She came to know of the joyous news only on the following day.

Kiran, who just turned 35, is youngest of Anita Desai's four children.  She doggedly "scratched, salved and picked" for seven long years to finish the novel, which was "quite a frightening, emotional experience."

Kiran's mother, Anita Desai, says that both she and her daughter have drawn from a shared pool of sources and experiences.  Nothing exemplifies this better than the striking similarity between the broad outline of The Inheritance of Loss and a novel penned by Anita Desai long ago in 1977, the compelling Fire On the Mountain.

The Inheritance of Loss offers a sharp view of globalization, multi-culturalism, economic disparity and the immigrant dilemma over identity.  In the words of Kiran, "I never set out to be political, but yes, politics does sometimes come into any look at issues such as immigration…  I think there are many experiences that people have.  They deal with the journey to the West in different ways.  But this trying to fit in, trying to be someone else can lead to strange stories…For each the journey and the loss is different."

Commenting on the award, India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said, "Kiran Desai's award shows the exceptional dominance and quality of Indians writing in English."

The other Booker Prize awardees from India are:

1971 – V.S. Naipaul for his In a Free State.  The beloved theme of Naipaul, who is a composite of India, Trinidad and Britain, is unfailingly to find fault with all his three legacies.

1981 - The controversial Salman Rushdie for his Midnight's Children depicting a sumptuous, wicked, magical and yet deeply realist fable of independent India told through the children born on that fateful night of freedom.

1997 – Arundhati Roy for her novel The God of Small Things, which John Updike called "a Tigerwoodsian debut".  It deals with caste, religion, Marxism, morality and other unforgiving social dragons.

(Compiled from the reports in The Times of India dated October 12, 2006.)