Kiran Desai

Desai was born in India and left at fourteen for England and then the United States, following the itinerant path of a family already split across continents; her mother, the novelist Anita Desai, shortlisted for the Booker three times herself, shaped her sense of fiction's stakes early.

The Inheritance of Loss (2006), her second novel, braids a retired judge and his orphaned granddaughter's uneasy household in Kalimpong, in the Himalayan foothills, with the story of their cook's son working illegally in New York restaurant kitchens, tracking how globalization's promises curdle on both ends. It won the Booker Prize, making Desai, at thirty-five, one of the youngest winners, and the first case of a mother and daughter both shortlisted for the prize.

She has published comparatively little fiction since, working slowly on a long-awaited follow-up while dividing her time between India and the United States.