Kiran Desai wins Man Booker Prize

Indian writer Kiran Desai, author of The Inheritance of Loss, has won the Man Booker Prize, Britain's most prestigious literary award.

Desai was named winner of the 50,000 prize ($105,000 Cdn) at a ceremony in London on Tuesday.

Desai, 35,is daughter of novelist and former Booker nomineeAnita Desai.The Inheritance of Loss, her second novel,is about a bitter old judge whose peaceful retirement in the Himalayas is upended by the arrival of his granddaughter and the son of his cook.

"To my mother, I owe a debt so profound and so great that this book feels as much hers as it does mine," Desai said as she accepted her award.

Shewas chosen from a short list ofsix writers from Britain, Australia, India and Libya:

• Britain's Sarah Waters, the favourite to win the award, for Night Watch,her novel of overlapping stories set during the Second World War.
• Australian Kate Grenville's Orange Prize-winning The Secret River, about a convict familytrying to builda new life in 19th-century Australia.
• Libyan writer Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men, about a nine-year-old boy trying to understand his father's disappearance in 1970s Tripoli.
• M.J. Hyland's Carry Me Down, about a 12-year-old Irish boy in Dublin trying to cope with the barren adult world.
• Briton Edward St. Aubyn's Mother's Milk,about the shifting currents and allegiances in a modern family.

Booker juries are notoriously fickle, and this year's short list was considered unusual because it left off some better-established writers, including Australia's Peter Carey and British writer David Mitchell.

Judges praised Desai's book as "a magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness."

The prize, formerly known as the Booker, is open to writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth of former British colonies. Founded in 1969, it was renamed when the financial services conglomerate Man Group PLC began sponsoring it four years ago.