Novelist and three-time Booker nominee Anita Desai said she was overjoyed that her daughter Kiran was awarded the Man Booker Prize for "The Inheritance of Loss", a win feted by the Indian press Thursday. "I am proud. Overjoyed," Desai told the Times of India. "She has worked very hard on the book for the last eight years."
After her Booker victory Tuesday, Kiran Desai thanked her mother profusely, describing her as almost a co-author of her book about the difficulties of life in post-colonial India and as an illegal immigrant.
She said she owed her mother "a debt so profound and so great that this book feels as much hers as it does mine". "It was written in her company and in her witness and in her kindness," Kiran Desai said.
Anita Desai, who has been a Booker Prize nominee three times but never won the award, was not present at the ceremony in England. She said she was afraid to attend in case her daughter was also passed over for the prize.
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