The author of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, talks about her love of The Wind in the Willows and how Latin American writers have influenced her
Kiran Desai
Kiran Desai was born in New Delhi, India, was educated in India, England and the United States, and now lives in New York
She is the author of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, which was published to unanimous acclaim in over 22 countries, and The Inheritance of Loss, which won the Booker Prize in 2006, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. Her third novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025.
In 2015, the Economic Times listed her as one of 20 most influential global Indian women.
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The writing moves with consummate fluency between an array of modes: philosophical, comic, earnest, emotional, and uncanny
The Booker Prize 2025 judges on The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
The Inheritance of Loss
Winner of The Booker Prize 2006
- By
- Kiran Desai
- Published by
- Hamish Hamilton
Kiran Desai won the Man Booker Prize in 2006 for this funny and politically acute family saga about a peaceful retirement under siege from all sides
Other nominated books
A spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years – an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity
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