BOOKER PRIZE-winning author Kiran Desai on Tuesday (23) returned to the prestigious literary award shortlist with The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, a novel described by judges as a “vast and immersive” tale of two young Indians in America.
The 53-year-old Delhi-born author, who won the Booker Prize in 2006 with The Inheritance of Loss, joins six writers from around the world on the 2025 shortlist.
Desai’s latest work, published by Hamish Hamilton, is also the longest on the list with 667 pages. Judges praised it as “an intimate and expansive epic about two people finding a pathway to love and each other. Rich in meditations about class, race and nationhood, this book has it all.”
The novel took nearly 20 years to complete. Should Desai win, she would become only the fifth double Booker winner in the prize’s 56-year history. Her victory would also seal an unprecedented clean sweep for India in 2025, after author Banu Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi won the International Booker Prize earlier this year for their short-story collection Heart Lamp.
“I wanted to write a story about love and loneliness in the modern world, a present-day romance with an old-fashioned beauty,” Desai said.
“As I wrote across geographies and generations, I realised I could widen the scope of the novel, to write about loneliness in a broader sense – not just romantic loneliness, but the divides of class and race, the distrust between nations, and the vanishing of a past world, all of which can be seen as forms of loneliness.”
Born and raised in New Delhi, Desai moved with her family to England at the age of 15 before settling in the US, where she now lives. Literary acclaim runs in the family: her mother Anita Desai was shortlisted for the Booker three times.
Other shortlisted works include Susan Choi’s Flashlight, Katie Kitamura’s Audition, Ben Markovits’s The Rest of Our Lives, Hungarian-British author David Szalay’s Flesh and Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter.
The winner of the 2025 Booker Prize will be announced on November 10 at Old Billingsgate in London. The winner will receive £50,000, while each of the six shortlisted authors will be awarded £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book.
(PTI)
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