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Kiran Desai India    PWF 2018

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“Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss?”

Winner of the Man Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss—Kiran Desai was born in 1971 in Chandigarh, India. The daughter of the revered Indian novelist Anita Desai—“they are indispensible, singular, worthy of tomorrow”.

For Desai, the rainy seasons are lit by a moral intelligence—conveying  the bittersweet memories of exiles at home and abroad—a humor born from darkness, the laughter of the dispossessed. “If god is in the details—from Harlem to the Himalayas—she captures the terror and exhilaration of being alive.”

As with Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard—Desai’s first novel—we are caught in the collision of modernity and cultural tradition. The force of her narrative skills conspires with the natural world.

“All night it would rain. It would continue, off and on and off, with a savagery matched only by the ferocity with which the earth responded to the onslaught. Uncivilized voluptuous green would be unleashed. Like ants, men would make their paths and civilization and their wars once again—only to have it wash way again.”

.Kiran Desai lives in New York.