Search
An association of writers working to advance literature, defend free expression, and to foster international literary fellowship.
PEN Features
Features Archive
PEN Podcasts
news
Audio Archive
speak out
PEN Members Online
Links & Resources
spacer
Newsletter


Kiran Desai
Jerry Bauer
Kiran Desai was born in India in 1971.

She lived in Delhi until she was 14 and spent a year in England before her family moved to the United States. She received an MFA from Columbia University.

Desai first came to literary attention when she was published in The New Yorker and anthologized in Salman Rushdie’s Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing.

Her first novel, Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard, won the Betty Trask Award. Her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, which is set in a Himalayan village in the mid-1980s, won the 2006 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

Kiran Desai is the youngest woman ever to win the Booker Prize—an award for which her mother, Anita Desai, has been short-listed three times.







Home | Site Map | Copyright / Privacy Policy | Contact Us © 2004-2012 PEN American Center. All rights reserved.