Kiran Desai, who won the Booker Prize in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss, has spent nearly two decades writing her third novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. The book, longlisted for this year's Booker, is a modern-day romance exploring class, race, nationality and family history. Desai, now 54, says she loved living in complete service to her writing, despite concerns from neighbours and family about her welfare.
Writing the 700-page novel took so long that Desai's notes swelled to 5,000 pages by 2013. She describes the process as 'stubbornness that I cannot explain', and says she became 'very determined and not very nice if I am kept away from my writing'. She feels lucky to have been able to work with such intensity, as she does not have to fit writing around children or family life.
Desai, who was 35 when she won the Booker, says the pressure after her win eventually fell away, and she lived in a very isolated way, writing alone at home in New York or on long trips to Mexico. She became so solitary that her social identity appeared to dissolve. 'I didn't think of myself as a person, particularly,' she says.
Finishing the book felt 'anticlimactic', Desai says, 'because it's ordinary life now, after living in a completely artistic world'. She doesn't quite know what to do with herself. The novel, like her previous one, is an epic, multistranded family saga that tackles big political and philosophical themes.
Desai also reflects on the immigration raids creating fear in her New York neighbourhood, saying she never thought such things would happen in the US. The book's characters, Sonia and Sunny, are Indian writers who moved to the US as students, and their story reflects the forces that keep people apart.
