Writer’s Block is not a painful experience, quite the opposite: Kiran Desai

In a conversation with Nirmala Lakshman, Chairperson of The Hindu Group and founder of Lit for Life, on Sunday (January 18, 2026), Booker Prize-winning author Kiran Desai spoke about how “loneliness is an essential component of the vocabulary of migration,” which she also chose to look in her 2025 Booker Prize Shortlist novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.

“The more people, the more lonely we are, such a strange thing,” Kiran Desai began, “and perhaps how we are all suffering from being in societies that are unravelling in the midst of change, which leaves us feeling bereft.” Ms. Desai spoke about her compulsion to explore why this was happening through her novel. The author also said that of all the books she may write in the future, this might be the last one she that she’s written that is set in India.

In her novel, she said, she was writing about far more cosmopolitan protagonists, and wanted to speak about their desire to the Western world, where her protagonists are infact educated to leave the country. “There are enormous power divides, enormous divides of race and gender, and when you are out in the big world, you have to overcome them and keep your dignity intact. In a world that is deeply power divided, the location of your dignity is much smaller than you imagine, which is what both my protagonists realise leaving India for a larger landscape,” she said, adding how they were searching for home and belonging in the novel.

Ms. Lakshman observed that despite the precise prose, there was lyricism in almost every paragraph of the novel. She also raised the question of whether slowness and deliberation should inform the lives of people in any way. On the case of the protagonist Sonia, the modern, educated woman who was in an abusive relationship in the novel, Ms Desai said that abuse of women cuts across every class.

Writer’s Block

After Ms Desai read an excerpt from The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Ms. Lakshman also asked how her mother, renowned author Anita Desai, had inspired her, and whether she became a writer because of her. “I inherited my mother’s bookshef and all her beautiful copies of Indian books that she carried with her to the United States. I also inherited her discipline of wiritng, and the rhythm of her writing life,” she said.

Ms. Desai added that writer’s block is a pleasure for her, and that these patient moments are part of her artistic and spiritual practice. “I mull things over, and go over my sentences. I enjoy that meditative time. So I think it is about how you look at it. I don’t see it (writer’s bock) as a painful experience, quite the oppsite,” she added.

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