What Kiran Desai said after being shortlisted for 2025 Booker Prize
Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai has been shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious international literary awards.
Kiran Desai has been shortlisted for her novel 'The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.' Her novel has been deemed "a profound and sweeping epic."
Five other authors have also been shortlisted, including three Americans, one British, and one Hungarian-British author. Six finalists were selected from over 150 contestants on Tuesday. The winner will be chosen in November.
Kiran Desai, 53, was born in Delhi. She won the Booker Prize 19 years ago in 2006 for "The Inheritance of Loss."
Spent almost 20 years writing her latest novel
She spent almost 20 years writing her latest novel and should Desai win this year, she would become the fifth double winner in the prize’s 56-year history and India would secure an unprecedented clean sweep of 2025’s Booker Prizes, after author Banu Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi won the International Booker Prize for their short-story collection ‘Heart Lamp’ earlier this year.
“I wanted to write a story about love and loneliness in the modern world, a present-day romance with an old-fashioned beauty,” said Desai.
“As I wrote across geographies and generations, I realised that I could widen the scope of my novel, to write about loneliness in a much broader sense. Not just romantic loneliness, but the huge divides of class and race, the distrust between nations, the swift vanishing of a past world – all of which can be seen as forms of loneliness,” she said after being nominated for Booker.
Her mother Anita Desai was shortlisted for the Booker three times
Born and brought up in New Delhi, Desai moved to England with her family at 15 before moving to America, where she has since lived. She has family history with the prize: her mother Anita Desai was shortlisted for the Booker three times.
Other works in the race to be shortlisted include Susan Choi with ‘Flashlight’, Katie Kitamura with ‘Audition’, Ben Markovits with ‘The Rest of Our Lives’, Hungarian-British David Szalay's ‘Flesh’ and Andrew Miller with ‘The Land in Winter'.
The winning book for 2025 will be announced on November 10 at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London, with the winner receiving GBP 50,000. The six shortlisted authors will each receive GBP 2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book. PTI AK GSP GSP
Earlier this year, author Banu Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasti won the International Booker Prize for their short story "Heart Lamp."