Kiran Desai Biography
Kiran Desai was born in India in 1971, she lived in Delhi until she was 14, then
spent a year in England, before her family moved to the USA. She completed
her schooling in Massachusetts before attending Bennington College; Hollins
University and Columbia University, where she studied creative writing, taking two years off to
write Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard.
She first came to literary attention in 1997 when she was published in the
New Yorker and in Mirrorwork, an anthology of 50 years of Indian
writing edited by Salman Rushdie - Strange Happenings in the Guava Orchard
was the closing piece. In 1998,
Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, which had taken four years to write,
was published to good reviews. She says, "I think my first book was filled with all that I loved most about India and knew I
was in the inevitable process of losing. It was also very much a book that came
from the happiness of realizing how much I loved to write."
Eight years later, The Inheritance of Loss was
published in early 2006, and won the 2006 Booker Prize.
When talking of the characters in The Inheritance of
Loss, and of her own life, she says, "The
characters of my story are entirely fictional, but these journeys (of her
grandparents) as well as my own provided insight into what it means to travel
between East and West and it is this I wanted to capture. The fact that I live
this particular life is no accident. It was my inheritance."
This biography was last updated on 07/02/2011.
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