BENNINGTON, Vt., October, 13, 2006 - The 2006 Man Booker Prize for Fiction  - one of the most distinguished prizes in literature went to Bennington College alumna Kiran Desai ‘93 for her novel The Inheritance of Loss published by Hamish Hamilton.  Desai, a graduate of literature from Bennington College, is the youngest recipient to claim such an honor. The prize amounts to $93,000 and will include a surge in book sales and worldwide readership.  

“Kiran Desai is an author of remarkable voice, insight, and character,” Elizabeth Coleman, president of Bennington College, remarked. “I am delighted that she has received such distinguished recognition for work that is both inspired and thoughtfully reflective of the footprints left in an increasingly global society.”

Chair of the judges Hermione Lee, following two-hours of deliberation, called The Inheritance of Loss “a magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness, and powerful political acuteness.” The novel is Desai’s second and follows the critically acclaimed The Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, published in 1998. 

The Inheritance of Loss, which reportedly took Desai eight years to complete, narrates parallel stories during the mid-1980s in India and New York, covering globalization, multiculturalism, inequality, and the different forms of love that exist.

“To my mother, I owe a debt so profound and so great that this book feels as much hers as it does mine.” Desai, the daughter of Anita Desai, a three-time Book Prize nominee, continued, “It was written in her company and in her witness and in her kindness.”

Bennington College (www.bennington.edu) is a nationally recognized liberal arts college in the Green Mountains of southwestern Vermont. The College offers a full range of study, with programs in the humanities, natural sciences, mathematics, social sciences, visual and performing arts, as well as a five-year Bachelor’s/Master’s degree in Teaching. Additional graduate programs include a Master’s of Arts in Teaching a Second Language.