Desai ’93 Reflects Upon Journey to America
Man Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai ‘93 was one of six immigrant authors to share their coming-to-America story in a recent issue of The New Yorker. In her essay “Fatherland,” Desai discusses the guilt that she and many of her Indian peers felt when leaving their parents to immigrate to America.
"Almost all the children of my parents' friends had been brought up to emigrate," Desai writes. "Across India, the parents were aging alone, summoning and soothing the melancholic tides with whiskey brought back by the global bastards, drifting to the familiar Indian feeling of being left behind."
Desai, who won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award for her novel The Inheritance of Loss, plans to release her forthcoming novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, in 2012.
Read the entire essay (subscription required).