Kiran Desai was born on the 3rd of September in 1971. She was born in Chandigarh, and spent the early years of her life in Pune and Mumbai. She studied in the Cathedral and John Connon School. She left India at 14, and she and her mother then lived in England for a year, and then moved to the United States, where she studied creative writing at Bennington College, Hollins University, and Columbia University.
In one of her interviews she writes: "Then I went on to Columbia but I took two years off to finish the book ["Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard"]; I couldn't go to school and write at the same time. I couldn't write a novel in the writing workshop environment."
Anita Mazumdar Desai was born on the 24th of June in 1937. She is an Indian novelist and the Emeritus John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a writer she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times; she received a Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel "Fire on the Mountain", from the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters. She won the British Guardian Prize for "The Village by the Sea".
In January 2010, Orhan Pamuk, recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, publicly acknowledged that he was in a relationship with Desai.
