Kiran Desai on loneliness, legacy and the curse of rewriting

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• 00:03

  Hello and welcome to Meet the Writers.

• 00:05

  I'm Georgina Godwin.

• 00:06

  My guest today is an award-winning author whose work has shaped the way we read about India and the diaspora.

• 00:12

  Her debil novel, Hala Baloo in the Guava Orchard won the Betty Trask Prize,

• 00:16

  her second The Inheritance of Loss won the 2007 Booker Prize and cemented her reputation as one of literature's most subtle observers of displacement and belonging.

• 00:27

  Almost 20 years later, she's returned with the loneliness of Sonia and Sonny, a sweeping,

• 00:33

  tender and deeply human story about love, exile,

• 00:36

  family and what it means to be alone in a crowded world.

• 00:41

  The work has been shortlisted once again for the Booker Prize.

• 00:54

  Kiran Desai, welcome to Meet the Writers.

• 00:56

  Thank you so much.

• 00:57

  It's such an honour for us to have you here, a former Boko Wai winner,

• 01:00

  and we're recording this before the winner for 2025 is announced.

• 01:05

  Let's go back, because you were born in New Delhi in 1971,

• 01:08

  and you came of age during a period of really big political upheaval,

• 01:13

  the emergency, protest, social change.

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  I wonder what you remember of that atmosphere and how you think it shaped your early sense of story.

• 01:22

  That's such a lovely question, such an important question,

• 01:25

  because I think it shaped my work so much.

• 01:28

  Now when I look back at that time of my childhood,

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