Kiran Desai

Kiran Desai (born September 3, 1971, New Delhi, India) is an Indian-born American author whose second novel, The Inheritance of Loss (2006), became an international best seller and won the 2006 Booker Prize. Her work focuses on the themes of multigenerational family dynamics, postcolonialism, and immigration. In 2025 she published the long-awaited novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.

Education

Kiran Desai—daughter of the novelist Anita Desai—lived in India until age 15, after which her family moved to England and then to the United States. She graduated from Bennington College in 1993 and later received two Master of Fine Arts degrees—one from Hollins University, in Roanoke, Virginia, and the other from Columbia University, in New York City.

Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard

Desai left Columbia for several years to write her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998), about a young man in provincial India who abandons an easy post office job and begins living in a guava tree, where he makes oracular pronouncements to locals. Unaware that he knows of their lives from having read their mail, they hail him as a prophet. Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard drew wide critical praise and received a 1998 Betty Trask Prize from the British Society of Authors.

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The Inheritance of Loss

While working on what would become her second novel, Desai lived a peripatetic life that took her from New York to Mexico and India. After more than seven years of work, she published The Inheritance of Loss (2006). Set in India in the mid-1980s, the novel has at its center a Cambridge-educated Indian judge living out his retirement in Kalimpong, near the Himalayas, with his granddaughter until their lives are disrupted by Nepalese insurgents. The novel also interweaves the story of the judge’s cook’s son as he struggles to survive as an illegal immigrant in the United States. The Inheritance of Loss was hailed by critics as a keen, richly descriptive analysis of globalization, terrorism, and immigration. When she received the Booker Prize for the novel in 2007, Desai became the youngest female writer to win the award.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

Desai spent 20 years working on her next novel. Published in 2025, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is another sweeping epic addressing globalization, family traditions, and the experiences of immigrants. The novel follows two young Indian writers living in the eastern United States, one in Vermont and one in New York City, who return to India, fall in love, and struggle to balance their careers and expectations of their parents. It was nominated for a 2025 Booker Prize.