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Kiran Desai is an Indian author. Her novel The Inheritance of Loss won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award. In 2015, The Economic Times named her one of 20 most influential global Indian women.
Desai left India at 14, and she and her mother lived in England for a year before moving to the United States. She studied creative writing at Bennington College, Hollins University, and Columbia University.
Her second book, The Inheritance of Loss (2006), was widely praised by critics throughout Asia, Europe, and the United States. It is set in the Himalayas and explores themes of identity, culture clash, and colonialism. It won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award. Desai became the youngest woman to win the Booker Prize at age 35 (a record broken by Eleanor Catton in 2013).
In 2008, Desai was a guest on Private Passions, the biographical music discussion programme hosted by Michael Berkeley on BBC Radio 3. In 2007, she was the featured author at the inaugural Asia House Festival of Cold Literature.
In 2008, the Gates Foundation project invited Desai to report on a community of sex workers in the coastal state of Andhra Pradesh. In 2009, she received the Columbia University Medal for Excellence. Desai was awarded a 2013 Berlin Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin.
In 2017, Desai said that she had been working for more than a decade on a new book "about power… about a young Indian woman out in India and the world". In December 2024, it was announced that after a break of nearly two decades, her next novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, would be published in the fall of 2025 by Hogarth Press, an imprint of Random House Publishing Group. In September 2025, the novel was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.
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