Kiran Desai phot call at the Man Booker Awards 2007

Kiran Desai returns from world book tour

Desai reveals what she has been up to for the past year in exclusive Perspective interview

5 August 2007

Kiran Desai has just returned from a worldwide author tour after winning the Man Booker Prize for Fiction last autumn. In an exclusive interview with Perspective magazine she reveals that she has seen “the world at last, but (was) moving too fast to see it”. Desai, who won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2006 for her novel The Inheritance of Loss, has just returned from an author tour in South Africa. In the past year she has also been to Brazil, China, Denmark, Hong Kong, India, Sri Lanka and Wales.

Desai says that she has been inundated with requests for endorsements since winning the prize. “Most of my recent reading has been for blurbs. I was helped by many generous writers. I feel I should be generous in return.” She also gave her support to other young writers admitting that “(it) isn’t easy to be a young writer; you have to convince others, convince yourself.”

Desai is grateful to have had the support and advice of her mother, Anita Desai, who was herself shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. Kiran Desai praises her mother’s experience as a writer saying, “It’s the rhythm of a writing life that comes from 50 years of working, and from that older time of being a writer in India when you wrote for writing’s sake alone, not for the cocktail samosas.”

Desai will return to her home in New York and is already considering her next novel. “I think the next book will also be a mish-mash of locations for the sake of being able to explore the truth and lies that exist between places.”

The full interview with Kiran Desai is available in the Perspective section

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