Authors Kiran Desai, Megha Majumdar, Arundhati Roy Named Kirkus Finalists

India-West News Desk

NEW YORK, NY – Kirkus Reviews has announced the 18 finalists for the 2025 Kirkus Prize, with three Indian authors—Kiran Desai, Megha Majumdar, and Arundhati Roy—among the nominees.

In the Fiction category, Kiran Desai’s “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny”  a nearly 700-page novel follows the lives of two young Indian writers, Sonia and Sonny, who are romantically involved with partners their families don’t know about. Their families, unaware of these relationships, attempt to arrange a marriage between them. The novel, which has been in the works for nearly two decades, delves into themes of love, family, and the role of the U.S. in the Indian imagination. An Associated Press reporter is a featured character in the book, which is also on the shortlist for the Booker Prize. 

Indian American Megha Majumdar is also a finalist for her propulsive new novel ‘A Guardian and a Thief’, set in a near-future Kolkata ravaged by climate change and food scarcity. The story, which unfolds over one week, follows two families and their desperate struggles: Ma, who must find her family’s stolen immigration documents, and Boomba, the thief whose escalating crimes are a result of his desperation to care for his own family. The novel explores how far two families, each driven by ferocious love and hope, will go to secure their children’s future amid a looming catastrophe. 

Arundhati Roy, meanwhile, has been named a finalist in the Nonfiction category for her memoir, an emotionally raw and intimate chronicle of her life, centering on her complex and turbulent relationship with her mother, Mary Roy. Her mother, a volatile yet defiant woman, raised her children alone and fought tirelessly to establish a successful school in a patriarchal society. Roy’s memoir recounts her own path to becoming a writer, her brief marriage, and her long relationship with a filmmaker. It also details the controversy she faced after publishing her Booker Prize-winning novel, ‘The God of Small Things,’ and her evolution into an outspoken critic of India’s political landscape. The book revives the story of an extraordinary woman while exploring the tangled complexities of filial love.

Each of the three category winners (Fiction, Nonfiction, and Young Readers’ Literature) will receive a $50,000 cash prize at an in-person ceremony on ‘ October 8, at the TriBeCa Rooftop in New York.