Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
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."
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What was your process for writing this book--did you start with
the characters or with the plot?
I started with a very small idea, really. I'd read a story in the
Times of India and heard about a character from many people, a man who
was a very famous hermit in India who really did climb up a tree, who lived in a
tree for many, many years, until he died. He died last year, I believe. So I
began to wonder what it was about someone like this who would do something as
extreme as to spend his life in a tree. So it started really with that
character, and then the story built up around it.
When I started writing it I had no idea what the story would be; I had no idea
of the plot. It sort of gathered momentum and drew me along. It was an
incredibly messy process and I don't know if it was the smartest way to go about
it because this was my first book, so I had to teach myself how to write as I
was writing it, and I don't know if I went about it the right way but I
certainly had a lot of fun. It was very messy though--I had to throw out many
pages--about half the book I think I ended up editing. Once I was aware of all
the different ways to go, all the plot turns to take.
So how did you ...
Monica Ali is the daughter of English and Bangladeshi parents.
She came to England at the age of three, and her first home was Bolton in Greater Manchester. Ali later studied at Oxford University.
Her first novel, Brick ...
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If you enjoyed:
The Inheritance of Loss
Try:
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Tahmima Anam is the recipient of a Commonwealth Writers Prize, an O. Henry Prize, and has been named one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and was recently ... (more)
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