Indian author Kiran Desai, who is in the running for a second Booker Prize in London on Monday for ‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny’, said she wanted to write a book about global loneliness that drew on her own “artistic loneliness” as a student in the US.

At a special pre-award ceremony at the Southbank Centre in London on Sunday evening, the 54-year-old author joined the five other shortlisted authors for readings and discussions around the themes of their novels that impressed the judging panel of one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards.

Desai, who won the 50,000-pound prize in 2006 with ‘The Inheritance of Loss’, has been working on this novel ever since and lifted the story of Sonia and Sunny from the reams of her writing over those 19 years.

“I wanted to write a book

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