Kiran Desai

Indian writer Kiran Desai was awarded Britain's prestigious Man Booker Prize on October 10 for "The Inheritance of Loss," a cross-continental saga that moves from the Himalayas to New York City.

Desai, daughter of novelist and 3-time Booker Prize nominee, Anita Desai, had been one of the favorites for the 50,000 pound prize.

"To my mother I owe a debt so profound and so great that this book feels as much hers as it does mine," said Desai as she accepted her award.

Judges deliberated for 2 hours before making their decision, hailing Desai's work as "a magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness."

"The remarkable thing about Kiran Desai is that she is aware of her Anglo-Indian inheritance- of V.S. Naipaul and R.K. Narayan and Salman Rushdie- but she does something pioneering," said Hermione Lee, chairman of the judges.

35-year-old Kiran, the youngest ever female recipient of the prize, held off the challenge of 5 other nominees, including the favorite, Sarah Waters, and her novel "The Night Watch," a story of love and loss during World War II. Other finalists were "In The Country Of Men," Hisham Matar's semi-autobiographical first novel about childhood in Moammar Gadhafi's Libya; "The Secret River," Kate Grenville's tale of life in a 19th-century Australian penal colony; "Carry Me Down," the story of an unusual boy, by Irish-Australian novelist M.J. Hyland; and "Mother's Milk," a portrait of a rich but dysfunctional family by English writer Edward St. Aubyn.