Kiran Desai Returns To The Booker Prize Stage

In Indian literary circles, the Desai name carries its own kind of quiet gravitas. Anita Desai, the matriarch, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, her novels Clear Light of Day, In Custody, and Fasting, Feasting cementing her as one of the most luminous voices of her generation. Her daughter, Kiran, inherited not just the vocation but the discipline. She grew up in a household surrounded by books, silence, a desk, and the slow, invisible grind of language.

When Kiran Desai won the Booker in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss, she did more than succeed where her mother had narrowly missed. At just 35, she became the youngest woman ever to win the prize at the time, her novel hailed as one of the defining works of twenty-first century literature. It was a dazzling moment, and for many writers, the beginning of a long career of visibility. For Desai, it was the opposite. After the international acclaim, she retreated. No hurried second book, no careerist essays to stay in circulation. Just absence.

That silence has lasted almost two decades. It has turned her into something unusual in the literary world: a writer who seemed content to vanish. While peers released book after book, Desai was rumoured to be discarding drafts, labouring over sentences, shaping and reshaping a manuscript that never quite seemed ready. For a long time, it wasn’t clear if she would ever publish again.

Kiran DesaiBooker Prize

And now she’s back, and back how.

Nearly twenty years after winning the Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss, she is once again on the shortlist — this time for The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, her long-anticipated third novel. It is a book of scale and patience: almost 700 pages, written over two decades, carrying with it the weight of absence and expectation. For readers and critics alike, the nomination feels less like a surprise than a restoration — the re-entry of a voice that has shaped the way we think about migration, belonging, and the delicate fractures of family.

If The Inheritance of Loss captured the fractures of globalisation and migration in the early 2000s, Sonia and Sunny turns inward, to the intimate negotiations of love, family, and belonging across continents.

"The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny" by Kiran DesaiAmazon

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

The novel follows Sonia and Sunny, two young Indians whose lives intersect between Delhi and New York. Their families once tried to orchestrate their union; instead, they spend years circling each other, caught between meddling relatives, the weight of history, and the dislocations of diaspora. What might first appear a simple love story becomes something deeper: a meditation on class, race, generational memory, and the fragile bonds that survive distance.

The book’s scale is sweeping, but its power lies in its quietness. Desai writes not in thunderclaps but in silences — in the ache of a missed call, the claustrophobia of a family apartment, the stale comfort of food carried across borders. It is a book that asks for patience from its readers, much as its author demanded of herself.

Should she win, Desai will join a rare pantheon of double Booker laureates — Coetzee, Hilary Mantel, Peter Carey — and would also complete a remarkable family arc: Anita Desai, the mother who came close three times, and Kiran, the daughter who could now take the prize twice. For India, it would mark an extraordinary year, following Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi’s International Booker triumph earlier in 2025.

The 2025 Shortlist

This year’s Booker shortlist reflects a turn toward established voices rather than first-time arrivals. Alongside Desai are Andrew Miller, shortlisted once before in 2001, with The Land in Winter, set during England’s Big Freeze of 1962–63; and David Szalay, whose Flesh follows the transformation of a Hungarian man from crime to high society.

From the United States, Susan Choi is recognised for Flashlight, a novel that traverses post-war Japan, suburban America, and North Korea, while Benjamin Markovits’s The Rest of Our Lives captures a professor’s midlife drift westward after leaving his daughter at university. Katie Kitamura, with the spare and taut Audition, adds a psychological edge to the list, her story of an actress confronting a man who may be her son standing out for its precision of form.

Chaired by Booker winner Roddy Doyle, with judges including Ayòbámi Adébáyò, Kiley Reid, and actor-publisher Sarah Jessica Parker, the panel has called the shortlist “brilliantly human” — an apt phrase for novels preoccupied with memory, endurance, and the uneasy collisions of private lives with history.

A Moment of Reckoning

The Booker has long been more than a literary award; it signals where contemporary fiction places its weight. In recent years, debuts and newer voices have dominated. This year, the tilt toward experience is clear — writers who take the long view, who invest in the slow excavation of character and history.

Within that shift, Desai’s presence feels especially resonant. Her long silence was not retreat but discipline, a refusal to produce until the work demanded it. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is proof that patience still has a place in literature, even in an age impatient for output.

On November 10, when the winner is announced at London’s Old Billingsgate, the prize will recognise not just a novel but a way of working. If Desai’s book claims the title, it will confirm what many already sense: that some stories are worth the long wait.