#UWRF26: Bali drives Kiran Desai to write fasterMuhammad Cohen

Last time Kiran Desai joined the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, she had just won 2006 Booker Prize for her novel The Inheritance of Loss. She’s back at the 2026 edition of the UWRF that opened Thursday and runs through Sunday to celebrate her new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, also nominated for a Booker.

“It’s worth taking less time to write a book so I can come back to Bali more often,” Desai said in a UWRF dialogue with Gill Westaway.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sonny, at its heart a love story, examines the lives of two young cosmopolitan Indians in the US at the start of the book, enjoying freedoms their parents did not.

“The story is not only their own, but that of their parents and grandparents,” Desai said. “It’s about the relationship between India and the world, mostly the western world, through generations.”

Loneliness is a portrayed as a symptom of living outside India. “Like water, it’s always morphing forms and changing shapes,” Desai said.

The ocean plays a key role in the book, and Desai uses it as a deep metaphor. “Loneliness as a mystical force like the ocean that divides and links continents together.” Dive in with Sonia, Sonny and Desai.

Former US diplomat and broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is Asia editor at large for iGaming Business, a longtime contributor to Forbes, columnist for Asia Times and author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about TV news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his biography, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook, LinkedIn, ex-Twitter @MuhammadCohen and now on Blue Sky @MuhammadCohen.bsky.social.