Kiran Desai, Arts Alumna, Awarded Man Booker Prize

Kiran Desai, a 1999 graduate of Columbia's School of the Arts, was announced as receiving this year's Man Booker Prize for Fiction winner for her novel The Inheritance of Loss. President Lee Bollinger said in a statement that Desai will return to Columbia next fall as an MFA candidate and a teacher in the School of the Arts writing division.

Given annually to the year's best novelist in the British Commonwealth or Republic of Ireland, the Man Booker Prize is considered by some to be the world's most prestigious literary award. As a Man Booker Prize winner, Desai joins the ranks of past winners Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, and Kazuo Ishiguro-but notably not her mother, Anita Desai, who was thrice nominated for the prize without winning.

While at Columbia, the younger Desai showed signs of prodigious talent. Binnie Kirshenbaum, a writing professor who served as one of Desai's thesis readers, indicated that there was hardly much advising to do.

"We didn't really have that much of a conference, because she had already published a novel at that point," Kirshenbaum said.

That novel was 1999's Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard, a comic young-adult novel about an eccentric Indian clan.

The theme of family has remained constant in Desai's work-her prize-winning second novel deals with a family split between Nepal and New York. She has described it as dealing with "the enormous anxiety of being a foreigner." Kirshenbaum noted that while she had spoken to Desai at Columbia about ideas the author was thinking about and had read Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard, she was surprised by The Inheritance of Loss.

"I always say yes to reading young writers, but when I picked this up, I was blown away," Kirshenbaum said.

Kiran Desai's win-something of a surprise in a year without a clear front-runner-has had tangible benefits beyond the Booker's prestige. She received a 50,000 pound prize, and her novel is now just outside of Amazon's top-10 sellers.

"We are proud of our School of the Arts alumna, Kirin Desai, for winning the Man Booker Prize," Bollinger said. "It's a great personal accomplishment for such a talented young writer."