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Kiran Desai wins Booker prize

Sarah Waters and Kiran Desai were favorites for the prestigious Booker literary prize on Tuesday.

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Updated at 3 am, Wednesday
 
LONDON: Indian writer Kiran Desai on Tuesday won the Booker Prize, one of the world's most prestigious literary awards, for her sweeping novel The Inheritance of Loss.
 
The prize, founded in 1969, rewards the best book of the year by a writer from Britain, Ireland or a Commonwealth country.
 
It guarantees the winner instant literary fame and a place in bestseller lists around the globe.
 
Kiran, Kate Grenville, MJ Hyland, Hisham Matar, Edward St Aubyn and Sarah Waters were shortlisted for UK’s pre-eminent literary award, the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2006. 
 
The shortlist was announced by the chair of judges, Hermione Lee, on September 14.
 
The shortlisted books, chosen from a longlist of 19, were:
  • Kiran Desai (The Inheritance of Loss)
  • Kate Grenville (The Secret River)
  • MJ Hyland (Carry Me Down)
  • Hisham Matar (In the Country of Men)
  • Edward St Aubyn (Mother’s Milk)
  • Sarah Waters (The Night Watch)
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai is set in the north-eastern Himalayas, at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga, in an isolated and crumbling house, where there lives an embittered old judge, who wants nothing more than to retire in peace.
 
But with the arrival of his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, and the son of his chatty cook trying to stay a step ahead of US immigration services, this is far from easy.
 
Kiran was born in India in September 1971, and was educated in India, England and the United States.
 
She is the daughter of the author, Anita Desai, who herself has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times.
 
Kiran Desai’s first book was Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998) that went on to win a Betty Trask Award.
 
She is a student in Columbia University's creative writing course.
 
John Banville was named the winner for Fiction with The Sea (Picador) for 2005.
 
Kiran succeeded where her mother failed and became the youngest woman ever to win the Booker Prize.
 
Kiran, whose mother and fellow writer Anita was three times shortlisted for the Booker, won the 50,000 pound prize at her first attempt.
 
She has just turned 35.   
 
“It was a magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness,” chairwoman of the judges Hermione Lee told reporters.   
 
Picking from a shortlist of relative unknowns after rejecting a string of literary heavyweights, Lee said “the winner was chosen after a long, passionate and generous debate”.
 
“It was absolutely not a compromise,” she said after the judges spent two hours picking the winner.   
 
The previous youngest woman winner had been Desai's fellow Indian Arundhati Roy who won the prize in 1997 when a month short of her 36th birthday.   
 
The youngest ever winner was Ben Okri who landed the Booker in 1991 at the age of 32.   
 
The judges said that Desai had taken eight years to write the carefully crafted novel that has now catapulted her into the literary limelight.   
 
The prize, founded in 1969, rewards the best book of the year by a writer from Britain, Ireland or a Commonwealth country.
 
In the past, the Booker shortlist has been attacked by critics who argue that the winners are all too often turgid tomes that would only appeal to literary academics.   
 
The award, sponsored by the futures brokers Man Group,  invariably stirs controversy.   
 
This year the big shock was the omission of leading authors and hotly fancied contenders like Peter Carey and David Mitchell.
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