LooseLeaves: It could be a testy moment in a mother-daughter relationship when, as happened with the £50,000 (€74,000) Man Booker Prize for Fiction on Tuesday night, the daughter - Kiran Desai (right) - carries off the hottest gong for literature this side of the Atlantic, and one that has often in the past eluded her mother - writer Anita Desai
The phrase "always the bridesmaid and never the bride" keeps coming to mind, though no doubt maternal pride swamps all other thoughts on such an occasion. The winning novel, The Inheritance of Loss (Hamish Hamilton) is dedicated to Anita Desai, who has been Booker shortlisted three times in her long, distinguished career.
Her mother would be proud of her, said the chairwoman of the judges, Hermione Lee, describing the winning book as a magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness. Debate had been long, passionate - and generous, she said. Though the decision was said to be a close one, there doesn't seem to have been any blood on the floor. Lee said it was clear that Kiran Desai was very aware of her Anglo-Indian inheritance, had learned from her mother's work and was aware of the work of older writers who shared her heritage, such as VS Naipaul and Salman Rushdie, though "she seems to jump on from those traditions and create something that is absolutely of its own".
"She's learnt from her mother that you get up in the morning and sit down and write the book even if it takes you eight years," said Lee.
John Sutherland, former jury chairman and critic, hailed it as "a globalised novel for a globalised world". Salman Rushdie has described her as a terrific writer. "This book richly fulfils the promise of her first."
But not everyone loved this novel. Reviewing it last month on these pages, Alannah Hopkin said The Inheritance of Loss, which considers post-colonial India and its diaspora and takes on larger issues including globalisation and multiculturalism, had a slow pace, and staggered under the weight of half a dozen parallel stories. "The novel is memorable chiefly for its portrayal of the older generation of Anglophile Indians" - an anachronism in post-colonial India.
Kiran Desai, who was born in India and raised in the US, is 35. She won the Man Booker prize with her first appearance on its prestigious shortlist, confounding the bookies who had her as aoutsider compared with the favourite, The Night Watch by Sarah Waters. It took Desai eight years to write this winning book, following on from her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. She is the youngest woman ever to win the Man Booker and is currently on a creative writing course at Columbia University. The thing is, will she now become a creative writing school drop-out? There can't be many teachers on such a programme who walk in each morning and see a Man Booker winner in the front seat, waiting to be told how it's done. www.themanbookerprize.com
Queen's laureate
British poet laureate Andrew Motion will be in Belfast next month to read at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's University. Motion, who has been poet laureate since 1999, is also the biographer of Philip Larkin and, most recently, author of In the Blood - A Memoir of My Childhood. (The reading is on November 16th, 7pm, Lecture Theatre G9, Lanyon Building, QUB, admission free.) The following Thursday, November 23rd, sees Scottish poets Douglas Dunn and Kathleen Jamie read from their work (7pm, same venue). This reading is linked to a symposium on relations between Irish and Scottish poets the following day (November 24th). www.qub.ac.uk/heaneycentre
Backing Irish sports writing
The first William Hill Irish Sports Book of the Year Award was launched in Dublin during the week. The company set up the Sports Book of the Year Award in London in 1989. Winners have included Lance Armstrong (2000) for It's Not About the Bike and Nick Hornby (1992) for Fever Pitch. Paul Kimmage won in 1990 for A Rough Ride, while other Irish writers shortlisted over the years include Eamon Dunphy in 1991 for A Strange Kind of Glory, Niall Quinn for his autobiography in 2002, and Kimmage again in 2001 for his biography of Tony Cascarino. The first William Hill Irish Sports Book of the Year Award is open to books published or distributed in Ireland for the first time between September 30th 2005 and September 29th 2006, whose author is resident in Ireland or whose content is of Irish sporting interest.