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London (dpa) - Indian writer Kiran Desai Tuesday won the 2006 Man Booker Prize For Fiction for her novel The Inheritance of Loss, dedicated to her mother, author Anita Desai.
The 35-year-old also became the youngest ever female winner of the 50,000-pound (93,500 dollar) award. Desai was chosen from a shortlist of six, dubbed the "outsiders list" owing to the absence of the usual big names.
Her mother, fellow novelist Anita Desai, was nominated for the prize three times - most recently with Fasting, Feasting, in 1999 - but always lost out.
"I think her mother would be proud," Hermione Lee, chairman of the judges, said at the award ceremony in London. "It is clear to those of us who have read Anita Desai that Kiran Desai has learned from her mother's work."
"Both write not just about India but about Indian communities in the world," Lee said.
The judges in London hailed The Inheritance of Loss as "a magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness."
The judges also described the book as "movingly strong in its humanity."
The Booker Prize shortlist had included first-time Libyan author Hisham Matar, Australian writer Kate Grenville and Britain's Sarah Walters, whose novel The Night Watch had been tipped favourite to win.
The Inheritance of Loss tells parallel stories set in post colonial India and the US.
In the foothills of the Himalayas, a Cambridge-educated Indian judge lives out a reclusive retirement until his orphaned teenage granddaughter comes to stay.
His existence eventually comes under threat from Nepali insurgents.
Meanwhile his cook's son, who has travelled to America to seek his fortune, has a miserable existence as an illegal immigrant in New York restaurant kitchens.
Desai herself lived in India until the age of 15, when she moved to England to continue her education.
From there she moved to the US, where she is currently a student in Columbia University's Creative Writing Course.
"The remarkable thing about Kiran Desai is that she is aware of her Anglo-Indian inheritance - of Naipaul and Narayan and Rushdie - but she does something pioneering," Lee said. "She seems to jump on from those traditions and create something which is absolutely of its own."
The Inheritance of Loss is Desai's second novel and took eight years to complete.
Her debut, Hullabaloo in The Guava Orchard, was published in 1998 and won the Betty Trask Award.
Copyright 2006 dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH
