Kiran Desai is the Indian-American writer whose novel The Inheritance of Loss (2006) won the Man Booker Prize and the fiction award from the National Book Critics Circle. The daughter of novelist Anita Desai (author of 1984's In Custody), Kiran Desai grew up in India, England and the United States. After starting college studies in science she switched to writing, and published her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, in 1998. The book earned praise from critics and got a boost from kind words by Salman Rushdie. Desai then spent six years writing The Inheritance of Loss, a novel that examines the intricacies of relationships in post-colonial India, England and the U.S.