If there was one thing that the youngest Booker prize winner Kiran Desai was not ready for when her novel The Inheritance of Loss was published, it would be the negative reaction that she received.
The author, who has based her book in the hill town of Kalimpong, in the Indian state of West Bengal, admitted that she had not been ready for all the criticism from the local people.
As for what it was that irked the ire of the people, well it seems that they didn’t quite like the way Desai had portrayed them in the prize winning book.
Desai revealed that after the book had been published, she had found herself the target of hate mails – a reaction that she admits had her worried.
"I got a huge amount of hate mail. I was worried about the response. I didn't quite understand it," the BBC quoted her, as saying.
On a lighter note, Desai admitted that she had not set out to spend seven years in seclusion writing the book, for she says working on one thing for that amount of time tends to make people “quite odd”.
"I didn't want it to take that long. If you spend that long working on one thing I think you become quite odd," she joked.
{{/usCountry}}"I didn't want it to take that long. If you spend that long working on one thing I think you become quite odd," she joked.
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