On the first day of the Jaipur Literature Festival, one of the most eagerly awaited conversations was that of acclaimed writer Kiran Desai in dialogue with literary critic Nandini Nair, in a freewheeling discussion on Desai’s latest novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, her return to writing after The Inheritance of Loss (2006), her lyrical prose shaped by memory and observation, and the many forms of loneliness that shape both private lives and public worlds. The book has been shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize.
Desai is a writer of rare appearances and even rarer words. A winner of the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Inheritance of Loss, she returned to the literary spotlight in 2025 with the novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, a book after nearly 20 years. The book, also nominated for the 2025 Booker Prize, follows Sunny and Sonia — two immigrants from India to the US — who chance upon each other on a train in India. Set between 1996 and 2002, the novel traces their romance while moving across geographies, histories, and emotional distances.
Returning to the festival after almost 15 years, Desai said she was elated to be back among readers. Though the novel took over two decades to complete — with an initial draft running over 5,000 pages later condensed to 688 — she described writing as a deeply “spiritual discipline and daily labour”, crediting it to the discipline of her last book. “Everything in my life is so that I can get up and work, like an ant or a bee or an earthworm taking one little morsel of real life and transposing it into artistic life,” she said at the press conference.
Nair drew attention to Desai’s signature lyricism, reading aloud a passage from The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny — describing a house help in Allahabad, her head and face covered with a sari the colour of dust as she sweeps the house into the veranda. Desai responded with visible delight, calling it “the heart of the book”, and revealed that the image came from childhood memories of her grandparents’ home in Allahabad. The novel is built from tiny observations — an ant in the grass, the colour of a sari — details that anchor vast histories of displacement in lived experience. “These details are what make us human.”
Politics of writing
Nair noted that The Inheritance of Loss was more political — set against the backdrop of insurgency and shaped by questions of immigration, colonial legacy, and globalisation — while The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is quieter, more intimate, even romantic. Desai agreed, observing that while political anger can sometimes be easier to write, entering private spaces between people is far harder.
“It’s easier to write an angry political book,” she said, “and harder to write about love, about death, about those private conversations.” Yet, she argued, these are precisely the reasons we read novels. Literature, she said, gives us a vocabulary for our own lives. “We understand love because we’ve read certain books. They help us live.”
The many faces of loneliness
Since the book’s publication, readers have often shared their loneliness with Desai. The title, she said, has opened conversations about a feeling frequently wrapped in shame. It’s a feeling people hesitate to admit but Desai wanted to explore its many dimensions.
In the novel, Desai said loneliness is not only romantic or emotional, but also intellectual, political, and historical. It exists between nations, classes, races, and generations, and is present in the disappearance of the natural world and the rapid vanishing of the past.
Desai emphasised that she wanted to delve into the gentler side of loneliness too. “Loneliness can also be sustenance — it can be the peace that comes after the war is over.” Speaking of Sonia’s mother, she added that “there are many worse things than loneliness. It can be the absence of fear… a necessary loneliness, especially during times of reinvention”.
In a world obsessed with rigid national and religious identities, Desai suggested that a certain loneliness is required to imagine more fluid ways of being. “We seek a more fluid sense of identity, which requires a kind of loneliness,” she said, particularly for those living lives shaped by shifting locations and affiliations.
Fame and privacy
Asked about her relationship with fame — having won the Booker Prize at 35 and becoming its youngest woman recipient — Desai was candid. “Maybe that’s why it took me 20 years,” she said, noting that writing requires privacy, even invisibility. “When you lose those eyes on you, that is when you can work,” she added.
During the audience interaction, Desai was asked about artificial intelligence and its growing presence in literature. With characteristic candour, she recalled experimenting with ChatGPT and asking it to write a story in her style. The result, she said, began “under a mango tree” before moving to “a guava orchard” — prompting both amusement and embarrassment. Recalling Salman Rushdie’s advice to Marlon James — “fruit and titles, just don’t do it” — Desai laughed at her younger self. “I was very young,” she said, adding that she now feels free to make fun of her own books. “I wasn’t thinking about how to write about India or the bigger world at all.”