Kiran Desai ’93 is the internationally acclaimed author of The Inheritance of Loss, which won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award. The novel, Desai’s second, explores the impact of British colonization in India.

Desai was born in New Delhi, India, and lived there until she was 10. She left India at 14, when she and her mother, the noted author Anita Desai, moved to England for a year before relocating to the United States. Desai studied creative writing at Bennington College, Hollins University, and Columbia University.

She first came to literary attention in 1997 when she was published in The New Yorker and in Mirrorwork, an anthology of 50 years of Indian writing edited by Salman Rushdie. Her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, was published in 1998 and went on to win the Betty Trask Award, a prize given by the Society of Authors for the best new novels by citizens of the Commonwealth of Nations under the age of 35.