From the Guardian:

Kiran Desai’s Booker-winning novel The Inheritance of Loss has been a bestseller in India for weeks now. It is displayed proudly in upmarket bookshops. Bootleg copies are brandished by boys, weaving in and out of traffic light fumes. These boys can’t read, but they know what everyone wants: “Kiran book”.

“The Booker is huge here - India cares for it in a deep, fierce way. It’s like Miss Universe. We think it is our own prize because so many Indians have won it and there is a disproportionate amount of interest within the country because of it,” explains Jeet Thayil, a poet and novelist who lives in Delhi.

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P.S. SAJA reports that Arundhati Roy is ready to return to fiction. According to Reuters, Roy said: “Just as resistance movements need to reinvent themselves, to shed their tired, old slogans, we all need to find new ways of doing what we’ve been doing. And that includes me.”

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