London: Kiran Desai won the Man Booker Prize on Tuesday for The Inheritance of Loss, her book about the difficulties of life in post-colonial India and as an illegal immigrant, the prize committee announced.
The 35-year-old Desai beat five other authors, including favourite Sarah Waters and her book The Night Watch, for the £50,000 (Dh341,992) award.
She becomes the youngest ever woman to win the prize, doing one better than her mother, Anita Desai, who was nominated for the award three times, most recently in 1999, but failed to win.
The previous youngest woman winner had been Anita's fellow Indian Arundhati Roy who won the prize in 1997 when just a month short of her 36th birthday.
The youngest ever winner was Ben Okri who landed the Booker in 1991 at the age of 32.
Kiran Desai's book was hailed by the judges as "a magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness".
Accepting her award, she praised her mother, to whom she said she owes "a debt so profound and so great that this book feels as much hers as it does mine".
"It was written in her company and in her witness and in her kindness.
"I really owe her this book so enormously, there isn't enough to convey it."
The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai's second novel, tells parallel stories based in post-colonial India and the United States.
A Cambridge-educated Indian judge is living out a reclusive retirement in the foothills of the Himalayas, until his orphaned teenage granddaughter comes to stay with him, and his existence eventually comes under threat from Nepalese insurgents. At the same time, his cook's son, who has moved to the United States to seek his fortune, is living a down-trodden life as an illegal immigrant in the restaurant kitchens of New York.
Desai herself lived in India until she was 15, before moving to Britain. She published her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, in 1998.
Desai said her mother likely did not yet know she had won the award, telling the BBC that she was "in a village in India, visiting my uncle... without a phone and without a television". She said her mother would most likely find out only in the next day's newspaper.
The chair of the panel of judges, Hermione Lee, said Anita Desai "would be proud" of her daughter:
"The remarkable thing about Kiran Desai is that she is aware of her Anglo-Indian inheritance - of [V.S.] Naipaul and [RK] Narayan and [Salman] Rushdie - but she does something pioneering," said Lee. "She seems to jump on from those traditions and create something which is absolutely of its own.
"The book is movingly strong in its humanity and I think that in the end is why it won."
Anita described the ordeal of writing the book as "seven, almost eight years of work, writing half stories, quarter stories ... I picked the novel out of it".
"It was quite a difficult, emotional experience for me."
The other four books in contention for the prize were Edward St Aubyn's Mother's Milk, M.J. Hyland's Carry Me Down, Kate Grenville's The Secret River and Hisham Matar's In The Country of Men.
The Inheritance of Loss was joint-second favourite to win the award, tied with Matar's debut effort, each with odds of 4/1, according to betting firm Ladbrokes. Waters's The Night Watch was the 6/4 favourite.
Last year's winner was The Sea by John Banville, with the award helping propel the book to sales of almost 250,000 copies.
The prize, founded in 1969, rewards the best book of the year by a writer from Britain, Ireland or a Commonwealth country.
In the past, the Booker shortlist has been attacked by critics who argue that the winners are all too often turgid tomes that would only appeal to literary academics.
This year the big shock was the omission of leading authors and hotly fancied contenders like Peter Carey and David Mitchell.