Alumna Kiran Desai ’93 received her second major literary honor on Thursday, March 8—the National Book Critics Circle fiction award recognizing her novel The Inheritance of Loss, published by Hamish Hamilton. The NBCC award comes following Desai’s claim as the youngest, female author to win the distinguished Man Booker Prize for Fiction, in October.

Desai joins four other members of the Bennington College community honored with this prestigious prize: Alumnus Jonathan Lethem ’86 (1999), former faculty member Stanley Elkin who one twice (1995, 1982), Alumna and faculty member Amy Gerstler MFA ‘01 (1990), and United States Poet Laureate and longtime Writer-in-Residence, Donald Hall (1988).

Accepting the award, Desai was humbled and recited a poem by Jorge Luis Borges, "The Boast of Quietness," which reads, in part, "More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude."

National Book Critics Award board member Geeta Sharma Jensen effusively praised her work. “Her deft narrative is compelling and her prose -- Allow me to gush: gorgeous, fluid, magnificent.”

The Inheritance of Loss narrates parallel stories during the mid-1980s in India and New York. Reviewing the book, the New York Times reflected that “although it focuses on the fate of a few powerless individuals, Desai's extraordinary new novel manages to explore, with intimacy and insight, just about every contemporary international issue: globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality, fundamentalism and terrorist violence.”

The novel is Desai’s second, taking eight years to complete, following her critically acclaimed release The Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, published in 1998.

To purchase The Inheritance of Loss, click here.

To read the story as reported by hundreds of news outlets including: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The San Diego Tribune, and others, please click on the corresponding links.