Kiran Desai was getting ready for a photo shoot and couldn’t decide what to wear. For the Indian-American novelist, the dilemma was fraught because of the cultural symbolism involved. “Should I wear my kurta because the photographer is coming? Or my dress? In the end I wore my kurta, but I took off my pyjamas and wore my kurta like a dress.” Over a video call from her home in the Jackson Heights neighbourhood of Queens in New York, Desai laughs at her makeshift solution. “That’s the absurdity that happens.”

The choice of a hybrid look – western and Indian – offers a portrait in miniature of what the 54-year-old has been doing for most of her working life: striving to present her authentic self as a writer who inhabits an in-between space, belonging to two countries and neither. Desai was just 14 when she moved first to England and then to the United States with her mother, and fellow novelist, Anita Desai. She studied creative writing at Bennington College in Vermont. She felt homesick for her father and family back in India. She assimilated over time. And she channelled her energies into fiction.

Desai became a roaring success. When her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, was published, in 1998, Salman Rushdie declared himself a fan. In 2006, at 35, Desai won the Booker Prize for her novel The Inheritance of Loss, making her the youngest author to ever do so. (Eleanor Catton would beat her record in 2013.) Her mother had been nominated for the Booker three times; Kiran’s nomination was the first time a mother and daughter had both got the Booker Prize nod.

And th