Kiran Desai

Kiran Desai, daughter of author Anita Desai, was born in India in 1971. At the age of 14, her family moved to England and the following year to America, where she completed her schooling in Massachusetts. She attended Bennington College and the Universities of Hollins and Columbia, taking two years off from the latter to write her first novel, "Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard," which was published in 1998. The book received the Betty Trask Award, a prize from the Society of Authors in the UK for writers from the former Commonwealth under the age of 35. Her second novel, titled "The Inheritance of Loss," was awarded the Man Booker Prize in 2006.