From The Guardian:
Kiran Desai’s Booker-winning novel tracks back and forth from the Himalayas to Manhattan. Just like the author, in fact. But rediscovering her Indian-ness was vital to her success, she tells Laura Barton. This morning she sits eating her eggs Benedict neatly, looking faintly bewildered. “I didn’t sleep at all,” she says. “I drank lots of champagne and then tried to sleep for three or four hours and didn’t manage to.” Her phone, she says, is “full of messages from three continents” and she has yet to even speak to her parents. There is an added charm to Desai’s win, as her mother, Anita Desai, has been nominated for the prize three times. “I hope she has heard,” says Desai. “But she’s living in a house without a phone.”
Desai, who is 35, lived in India until she was 14, when she and her mother left first for the UK and then for the US, where she has lived ever since. However, she still holds on to her Indian passport. “Now I could become an American citizen, but then George Bush won and I’ve just been unable to bring myself to do so,” she explains, half-apologetically.
More here.
