Associated Press

London, Oct 11: Indian writer Kiran Desai won Britain's prestigious Man Booker Prize on Tuesday for The Inheritance of Loss, a cross-continental saga that moves from the Himalayas to New York City.
Kiran, daughter of novelist, and three-time Booker Prize nominee, Anita Desai, had been one of the favourites for the $93,000 prize.

"To my mother, I owe a debt so profound and so great that this book feels as much hers as it does mine," Kiran said as she accepted her award. "It was written in her company and in her witness and in her kindness."

Judges deliberated for two hours before making their decision, hailing Kiran’s work as "a magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness."

"The remarkable thing about Kiran Desai is that she is aware of her Anglo-Indian inheritance — of (V S) Naipaul and (R K) Narayan and (Salman) Rushdie — but she does something pioneering," said Hermione Lee, chairman of the judges.

"She seems to jump on from those traditions and create something which is absolutely of its own. The book is movingly strong in its humanity and I think that in the end is why it won."

Kiran, educated in India, England and the United States, published her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, in 1998. The Inheritance of Loss is her second book.