Accepting the Man Booker Prize for her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai said, "I didn't expect to win. I don't have a speech. My mother told me I must wear a sari, a family heirloom, but it's completely transparent!"

Accepting the award at a ceremony at the Guildhall in London on Tuesday night, Desai thanked her publisher, editor and agent and then said, "I'm Indian and so I'm going to thank my parents."

Of her mother, noted writer Anita Desai, 69, she said, "I owe a debt so profound and so great, that this book feels as much hers as it is does mine. It was written in her company and in her wisdom and kindness in cold winters in her house."

But she did not get to immediately share news of her triumph with her mother.

"She went to visit her brother, who lives in a Tibetan refugee settlement in a village that has no phone and no television," she told reporters afterwards. "She is probably sleeping very peacefully right now. My mother told me never to be a writer as it is such a difficult profession. It is so hard."