KIRAN DESAI, the Indian-born writer, last night became the youngest woman to win the Man Booker Prize — the literary award that had eluded her mother on three occasions.

The 35-year-old author was presented with the £50,000 prize in London yesterday after it was announced that her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, had eclipsed the works of five other shortlisted authors.

Desai, who lived in England as a teenager for a year before moving to America, where she is a student on Columbia University’s creative writing course, had dedicated The Inheritance of Loss with the words: “My mother, with so much love.”

The novel, which took eight years to write, draws on Desai’s experience of leaving India. The emotions sparked by being uprooted and transplanted are recurring themes within a story of an embittered retired judge living in the Himalayas.

Last night, after a session that lasted two hours, the panel chose Desai’s novel. Accepting her award, Desai said: “I didn’t expect to win. I don’t have a speech. My mother told me I must wear a sari . . . a family heirloom, but it’s completely transparent!” After thanking her publisher, editor and agent, she added: “I’m Indian and so I’m going to thank my parents.”

Of her mother, Anita Desai, 69, she said: “I owe a debt so profound and so great that this book feels as much hers as it is does mine. It was written in her company and in her wisdom and kindness in cold winters in her house . . . One minute isn’t enough to convey it.”

Later she said that she had yet to break the news to her mother that she had won the prize. “I think she was so worried on my behalf. She gave me lots of advice and then went to her brother in a Tibetan refuge centre where there is no phone and no TV. She’s probably sleeping very peacefully.”

Novels by Anita Desai reached the Booker shortlist in 1980, 1984 and 1999. Asked how her mother had felt about not winning the Booker herself, her daughter said: “She wasn’t sad at all. She is very calm and strong. She told me, ‘Everyone around you will be excited and nervous . . . You just write your next book no matter what happens’.”

The bookmakers had initially dismissed Kiran Desai as the 7/1 outsider. The judges — the poet and novelist Simon Armitage, the novelist Candia McWilliam, the critic Anthony Quinn and the actress Fiona Shaw — felt differently.

Hermione Lee, chairwoman of the judges and Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at Oxford, said: “This is a magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness.” The winner was not a “compromise” choice. “We so much admired all these novels.”

The achievement was the more extraordinary given that Peter Carey, the Australian bestselling novelist, had been tipped to win for a third time. Desai also eclipsed the veteran South African Nadine Gordimer and established British writers. From a total of 112 entries, the judges went for six authors yet to become household names.

Rodney Troubridge, of Waterstone’s, said that Desai’s book “continues the fine tradition of Booker winners set in India. Kiran Desai’s wonderful novel will be snapped up by Waterstone’s customers.”

Others had mixed feelings. John Sutherland, chairman of last year’s Booker judges, said: “It is a really good novel but it needs a going-over by a good editor. The novel needs control.”

But the award is sure to bring her book success. Sales of last year’s winner, John Banville’s The Sea, have topped a quarter of a million.

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