Now you have to buy it, biatches!

Kiran Desai has won the 2006 Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss, at age 35 the youngest woman ever to win.

The previous youngest woman winner had been Desai’s fellow Indian Arundhati Roy who won the prize in 1997 when just 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. [Link]

Desai waves the Indian flag proudly:

I left India when I was 15 so my memories of India are strong. Also, I still have family here and return to the family home every year… I was born in Chandigarh and I have lived in Pune, Mumbai, Delhi and the Kalimpong hills… the heart of where I work from, even while writing about America, comes from having grown up in India, from having an Indian family and from being an Indian.

… the delight of sitting on a Delhi rooftop in the winter sun, eating kebabs and listening to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; of swimming in the Jamuna at Tajewala with our beloved family dog; going to Ranthambore, Sariska and Corbett Park in the hopes of seeing a tiger but never seeing one; getting cooking lessons from the family cook; the joy of going to the Himalayas for the summer; big political events, like the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the riots that followed; the horrors of school–I still can’t wear the shade of pink that is the Loreto Convent uniform; and above all, the jokes and the good humour that, to me, is so deeply a part of India. I miss it terribly…

It’s a wonderful time to be an Indian writer. We are not a scrawny, undernourished society anymore. [Link]

Thrice-nominated mom Anita Desai will be proud:

Kiran Desai does not have to go to writers’ retreats for literary company. She just drives four hours from New York to Cambridge where she will hole up in her mother Anita Desai’s home, fine-tuning her work. For inspiration and isolation, mother and daughter often repair to a remote part of Mexico renting a villa owned by a friend. [Link]

When I last corresponded with Yalie Bill Deresiewicz, who freelances book reviews, he was highly annoyed with the anti-globalization polemics in the novel. He’s going to be apoplectic

Author of the 1998 universally praised Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, Desai is the first woman to win the Man Booker since 2000 when Margaret Atwood scooped the prize with The Blind Assassin…. Harvey McGrath, Chairman of Man Group plc, presented Kiran Desai with a cheque for £50,000… [Link]

Desai joins Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, V.S. Naipaul, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Michael Ondaatje and Yann Martel, among others, in the list of desi-influenced Booker winners:

“This continues the fine tradition of Booker winners set in India, such as Heat and Dust, Staying On, The God of Small Things, and Midnight’s Children…” [Link]

Some are worried about the marketing of the young and photogenic:

After winning this year’s Orange prize for her third novel, On Beauty, Zadie Smith, built up for six years as an ultra-celebrity, said at the age of 31 she felt she had no inspiration left for a next book. [Link]

Here’s my review and a funny excerpt from her previous novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. We are not a scrawny, undernourished society anymore

‘ I think the first book was shallower because it was written for a group. This time there was nobody. I was isolated and I wrote and lived for the writing alone, driving it forward into a dark place I couldn’t have reached while enrolled in a writing programme. To be in class makes one automatically self-conscious and art is better when the ego is missing.’ [Link]

Kiran Desai was born in India [in]… 1971 and [was] a student at Columbia University’s Creative Writing Course. Her first novel Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard received accolades… and an excerpt was featured in the New Yorker India Fiction issue, and in Mirrorwork, Salman Rushdie’s controversial anthology of 50 years of Indian writing. It went on to win the Betty Trask Award. [Link]

Sepia has discussion. Congrats!

Related posts: Desai, Murr nominated for Booker, TODAY: Kiran Desai reading, The tree groom, India: A Million Slush Pile Rejects Now, ‘The Inheritance of Loss’, I coulda been a contendah, The Prophecy, Booker ‘em, Dano