2006 Booker Prize Winner Announced

Kiran Desai was announced as the Booker Prize winner yesterday, for her novel The Inheritance of Loss. This literature prize started in 1969 and is awarded to the best book of the year by a writer from Britain, Ireland, or a Commonwealth country. Desai is the youngest woman author to ever receive the honour. The story draws on Desai's experiences as she left India as a teenager, and went to England and then the United States to live. Desai also published a novel in 1998 called Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, which was well received by literary critics.

• Listen to Desai read from The Inheritance of Loss, at The New York Times

Short-listed Booker Prize Books available at the Greenwich Libraries:

• The Secret River, by Kate Grenville
• Mother's Milk, by Edward St. Aubyn
• Carry Me Down, by M.J. Hyland
• The Night Watch, by Sarah Waters