London, Sep 23 (PTI): Booker Prize-winning author Kiran Desai on Tuesday returned to the coveted literary award shortlist with ‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny’, a novel described by the judges as a “vast and immersive” tale about a pair of young Indians in America.
The 53-year-old Delhi-born author, who won the Booker Prize 19 years ago in 2006 with ‘The Inheritance of Loss’, joins six writers from around the world on the coveted literary shortlist.
Desai’s latest novel stands out as the longest, weighing in at 667 pages and published by Hamish Hamilton.
“An intimate and expansive epic about two people finding a pathway to love and each other. Rich in meditations about class, race and nationhood, this book has it all,” judges said of Desai’s latest work.
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.
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
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