The Indian-born novelist Kiran Desai triumphed last night by winning the £50,000 Man Booker prize with her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, a story replete with sadness over globalisation and with pleasure at the surviving intimacies of Indian village life.
She beat the bookies, who put her fifth out of six in the award shortlist, rating her as a 5/1 outsider, compared with odds of 6-4 on Sarah Waters' The Night Watch, the favourite.
At her first attempt Desai, 35, not only became the youngest woman to win but achieved a victory which repeatedly eluded her mother. The esteemed Indian novelist Anita Desai - to whom The Inheritance of Loss is dedicated - has been shortlisted three times for the Man Booker.
On hearing the result Desai said: "The debt I owe to my mother is so profound that I feel the book is hers as much as mine. It was written in her company and in her wisdom and kindness."
This year's head judge, Hermione Lee, left no doubt that it was "the strength of the book's humanity" which gave it the edge after a long and passionate debate among the judges. "It is a magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness," Professor Lee said. "Her mother will be proud of her."
It's mind-boggling to Americans that the British bookies keep close tabs on all the major book prizes and that people gamble on them. Now that's what we call a book-centric society.
