Over the years many readers have asked Kiran Desai, who has just been nominated for this year's Man Booker Prize, what it means to be a writer in her mother's shadow.
Now, the New York based writer, whose The Inheritance of Loss received some of the best reviews of the year in America, might chuckle at another prospective question: What it means to be a Booker nominee especially since her mother Anita Desai has been nominated three times for the prestigious British prize.
This year's list of 19 competitors includes Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer (Get a Life).
"My mother and I were chatting about the Booker," Desai tells rediff.com, "and she said never mind the nominations and awards, a writer has to focus on the work at hand, or the plan to write the next book. Everything else comes next."
Even then the Booker, which carries a prize of 50,000 British pounds (about $95,000), can turn a good book into a bestseller. Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, which among other things is also a poignant stories of depravities and economic injustices in the region bordering Nepal, is due to be published in the United Kingdom next month. The paperback edition of the American novel is also due within the next six weeks.
Desai was vacationing on
a cousin's farm in Vermont when she heard from her agent on her nomination.
"A Booker nomination means getting more attention to your book which is not an easy thing considering that your book is set in India," Desai continued.
She added, with a chuckle: "There are many British writers of Indian origin there who get a lot of attention because they happen to be there."
'It is a list in which famous established novelists rub shoulders with little-known newcomers,' the chair of the judges Hermione Lee said in a press release. 'We hope that people will leap at it for their late summer reading and make up their own shortlist,' she added.
Desai will be competing with, among others, three former winners -- Peter Carey, Nadine Gordimer and Barry Unsworth.
'Judging the Man Booker Prize puts you through almost as many emotions as there are in the novels,' Lee said, adding: 'We have tried to be careful and critical judges as well as being passionately involved. We have many regrets about some of the novels we have left off, and we could easily have had a long list of about 30 books, but we are delighted by the variety, the originality, the drama and craft, the human interest and the strong voices in this long list.'
The long list, which has 19 writers chosen from 112 critically acclaimed novels, will be whittled down to a shortlist of six to be announced on September 14. The winner will be announced October 10.
