India has been consistently producing award-winning authors or inspiring other writers to base their works on Indian colour, themes and identity. Kiran Desai has written an exquisite novel which won the prestigious Booker Award and found a place in the New York Times Most Notable Fiction list. This is a novel to be savored for its stunning prose, complex characters and finely captured sense of place.
Her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, published in 1998, received widespread fame and praise. It won the Betty Task Award for the best new novel by citizens of the Commonwealth of Nations under the age of 35. Published to unanimous acclaim in over twenty-two countries, eight years later, The Inheritance of Loss won the 2006 Booker Prize. The extraordinary achievement makes the 35 year old Desai the youngest woman ever to win the Booker, a distinction previously enjoyed by Arundhati Roy. A story of such depth and emotion, hilarity and imagination, Desai’s second, long-awaited novel fulfills the grand promise established by her first. This novel manages to explore just about every contemporary international issue: globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality, fundamentalism and terrorist violence. Desai is now among a growing group of prominent young novelists of Indian background, including Arundhati Roy and Jhumpa Lahiri.
Kiran Desai and Her Fictional World is a collection of twenty-seven critical essays which treat Kiran Desai’s works with infinite interest, respect and sensitive understanding. The contributors to the volume have studied the novels of this celebrated writer from various angles. The anthology presents the background of Man Booker Prize and introduces Kiran Desai. Editors have presented this anthology in two sections, each dedicated to one of her novels. This volume will be useful to not only the students of Kiran Desai’s fiction, but also the common readers to understand Desai's fictional world better.
Vijay K. Sharma is a distinguished researcher and teacher. He has been a Fulbright scholar at Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, and University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; a British Council visitor to Oxford University and Strathclyde University to study cultures of England and Scotland; a Post-Doctoral Indo-Shastri Canadian research fellow at Carlton University and the University of Toronto; and a Salzburg Seminar fellow at Salzburg, Austria. He is also the recipient of several Study and Research Grants/Awards. An M.A., M. Phil., Ph.D. from the University of Delhi, he has been trained at the CIEFL, Hyderabad in English Language Teaching (ELT). Apart from having co-edited two books, Dr. Sharma has published a number of research papers in various international and national journals. Currently, he is the Principal of Ram Lal Anand College, University of Delhi, New Delhi.
Neeru Tandon, M.A., L.L.B. (topper and gold medalist from Kanpur university), obtained her Ph.D. in Indian-English fiction. She is an editor, author, critic, feminist and a poet too. Her area of interest is contemporary fiction, mainly by Indian-English, Afro-American and Canadian women writers. She has been teaching English for the last 23 years. Presently, she is an Associate Professor at the Post-graduate Department of English, VSSD College, Kanpur. She has submitted her post-doctoral research work (D.Litt) in feminist fiction of India and America.
Dr. Tandon has written many books which include Margaret Atwood: A Jewel in Canadian Writing; Feminism: A Paradigm Shift; Emily Dickinson: A Fresh Perspective; and Anita Desai and Her Fictional World. She is also a course coordinator at IGNOU (M.Phil Program on Gender Studies) and at CSJM University, Kanpur.
