The 35-year old Indian writer, author of The Inheritance of Loss, is the youngest woman ever to win the Man Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award. She was chosen from a short list of six writers from Britain, Australia, India and Libya. Desai’s mother, Anita Desai, has been nominated for the Booker three times since 1980 but has never won. “To my mother, I owe a debt so profound and so great that this book feels as much hers as it does mine,” Desai said. “I wrote this book so much in her company it feels almost like her book.” The Inheritance of Loss (Grove Press) is a novel that addresses “identity, displacement and the indissoluble bonds of family.” It is set “in a remote corner of India against the backdrop of growing Nepalese unrest, and in the streets of Manhattan, where illegal immigrants try to make a living while eluding the authorities.” Hermione Lee, chairwoman of the judges, said that Desai and her mother “Both write not just about India but about Indian communities in the world. The remarkable thing about Kiran Desai is that she is aware of her Anglo-Indian inheritance—of Naipaul and Narayan and Rushdie—but she does something pioneering. She seems to jump on from those traditions and create something which is absolutely of its own. The book is movingly strong in its humanity and I think that in the end is why it won.” Desai wrote the book while living on her advance. She stretched the money by living in Mexico, India, and by renting small rooms in cramped New York houses. “The end of the book came partly out of financial necessity,” she said. “I was very poor, and everyone in my family was saying, ‘Oh, you’re going to have to get a job.’ My mother was the one person who stood by the book, but everyone else was saying ‘It’s awful, you really have to be responsible, you must get a job, you have to get health insurance!’” She spent nearly eight years writing the book, “writing half stories, quarter stories, stories in eighths, of broken people, difficult lives and I picked the novel out of it.” I went back to write the Indian bits in India, so it wasn’t entirely from a distance.” Desai was born in New Delhi, and spent her childhood in India before moving to England at fourteen; her family relocated to the US one year later. She attended Bennington College, Hollins University, and then Columbia, where she took two years off to write, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, her first book. The Booker prize carries an award of £50,000, and guarantees a global increase in sales and recognition.