Author: Kiran Desai
Profile: Kiran Desai is an Indian born American author. She is the daughter of Anita Desai who herself was shortlisted 3 times for the Booker Prize with her being the youngest female writer to win the award. Kiran was born is Delhi and spent her early life in Mumbai and Pune. She and her mother then resided in England for one year and then she moved to the United States to study creative writing at Columbia University School of Arts, Hollins University and Bennington College.
Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard is the first critically acclaimed novel, of the author Kiran Desai, which was published in 1998. The Inheritance of Loss is her second novel which won the Man Booker Prize in 2006 and in 2015 it won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Her peripatetic life took her to India and Mexico from New York, while working on her second novel. She has been listed as one of the twenty most influential Indian women across the world, in 2015.
She has been a guest on the biographical music discussion programme, ‘Private Passions’ in August 2008 which was hosted on BBC Radio 3 by Michael Berkeley. At the inaugural Asia House Festival of Cold Literature, in May 2007, Kiran Desai has been the featured author. Notable figures in the literary world, including Salman Rushdie has honored her for her novel Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard.
Writing style: Kiran Desai’s writing style offers a special touch to the main character in her novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. She represents the protagonist paralleled all through the novel by employing this technique.
Published Texts:
Novels
1986 – The Golden Gate
1993 – A Suitable Boy
1999 – An Equal Music
Poetry
1980 – Mappings
1981 – The Tale of Melon City
1985 – The Humble Administrator’s Garden
1990 – All You Who Sleep Tonight
1991 – Beastly Tales
1992 – Three Chinese Poets
1994 – The Frog and the Nightingale
2015 – Summer Requiem: A Book of Poems
Children’s fiction
1994 – Arion and the Dolphin
Non-fiction
1983 – From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet
2005 – Two Lives
2011 – The Rivered Earth
Appearances in poetry anthologies
2008 – The Golden Treasure of Writers Workshop
1992 – The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets
Awards and Acknowledgements:
1998 – Betty Trask Award
2006 – Man Booker Prize
2013 – Berlin Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin
2015 – National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada
