[Interview] Ion Trewin, Man Booker Prize Administrator
Author of the 1998 internationally acclaimed Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard , Kiran Desai is the first woman to win the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in six years. The award last went to a woman in 2000 when Margaret Atwood scooped the prize with The Blind Assassin . At 35, Desai is also the youngest woman ever to win the award. Desai's winning book, The Inheritance of Loss , is a radiant, funny and moving family saga that has been described by reviewers as, among other things, ‘the best, sweetest, most delightful novel’. The Inheritance of Loss won ahead of Kate Grenville's The Secret River , M.J. Hyland's Carry Me Down , Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men , Edward St. Aubyn's Mother's Milk and Sarah Waters' The Night Watch . This year judges selected 19 novels from 112 for the longlist. Of those 112 novels, 95 were submitted and 17 were called in by the judges. Man Booker Prize administrator, Ion Trewin spoke about the prize, the books that made it on