Literary Birthday – 3 September – Kiran Desai

Happy Birthday, Kiran Desai, born on 3 September 1971.

Kiran Desai Quotes

1. I do think that the modern India does belong to writers who are living in India.
2. I’m always in the kitchen, cooking and experimenting – I love it. And every now and then I think, ‘I should write a cookbook’ or, ‘I should write for food magazines.’ And then I get drawn back to writing fiction again.
3. When you write on your own, you can write the extremes. No one else is watching and you can really go as far as you need to.
4. You can catch more flies with honey than with sour milk.
5. The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.

Kiran Desai is an Indian author. Her novel The Inheritance of Loss won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award. Her work focuses on the themes of multigenerational family dynamics, postcolonialism, and immigration. In 2025 she published the long-awaited novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. It was nominated for a 2025 Booker Prize. Her mother is the novelist Anita Desai.

Source for Image: Penguin Random House

by Amanda Patterson
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