A House Full of Stories: Kiran Desai ’98 Returns to I-House
For artists and thinkers living between countries, the tensions of displacement and belonging can be a daily challenge. One alumna recalls channeling those feelings into her creative work at International House, where she found a sense of home, community, and creative center.
On March 9, I-House welcomed the return of award-winning author Kiran Desai ’98 for a conversation exploring what it means to live and create between places, languages, and shifting ideas of home. The event centered on Desai’s recent novel and broadened into a rich discussion about migration and identity, loneliness and belonging, and the role of fiction in a globalized world.
President and CEO Sebastian Fries offered opening remarks, reflecting that I-House has long served as a creative refuge for international writers, poets, and thinkers. He noted that Desai’s first book, “Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard,” was partly written during her stay at I-House.
“Kiran, you shared that I-House was the perfect place for writing,” he said. “You would retreat to your room for some quiet time, and then, when you were done writing for the day, head down to the Dining Hall to recharge and reconnect with friends, like so many of us do.”
Desai was a resident in the late 1990s while enrolled in Columbia University’s MFA program. At I-House, she discovered a creative space that anchored her early years in New York, shaping both her writing practice and her sense of artistic independence.
“I was in the MFA program, and I would go to classes, but that was never really the center. I think because I still wanted to center myself in my writing,” she said. “I-House was my home. It was the center.”
Born in New Delhi and educated in India, England, and the United States, Desai now lives in New York and is the author of three celebrated novels. Her latest work, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize. The story traces the intertwined lives of its two protagonists in a sweeping love story exploring culture, tradition, and individuality. Desai noted that the novel draws on her experiences as a young woman immigrating to the U.S. and the loneliness that came with adjusting to a new place.
“It was my first experience of being physically alone,” she said. “And I think that is the drastic difference for so many of us, from the countries we come from to here, that you may feel completely lonely. And so the subject of this last book was loneliness and all of its different forms in our globalized, modern world.”
But that loneliness is not without merit, she noted. “Being alone is perhaps the time for self-reinvention. It’s a time of freedom, when you recognize the kind of privacy of your individual being. It’s the beginning of a sense of self against the world, against the historical narrative, against the big crowd. So it’s also really important, and for me, it was also the time I started writing.”
Tara Maria Fernandes ’25, a fellow I-House alumna, moderated the evening’s discussion. Fernandes, who founded the I-House Book Club in 2023, reflected on her appreciation for Desai’s work and recalled how she first came across her stories.
“It was summer of last year, and a lot of us were leaving I-House, and I happened to stumble upon this little short story in The New Yorker,” she said. “It talked about an international dormitory on Riverside Drive, and had some descriptions about a dining hall, and it seemed very, very familiar. So I quickly put it on our book club group, and I said, ‘We need to chat about this!’”
“This book has so much I-House in it,” Desai said with a smile. “I had to cut it back!”
As the discussion opened to Q&A, audience members returned to themes of migration and belonging, the pressures of genre and representation, and the challenges of writing across cultures. Reflections from the group underscored the important role of community in shaping lived experience and supporting creative work.
“It’s hard for so many people because New York is a big city,” Desai said. “You’re on your own. You’re in the United States. You’re in a completely different country where, for many of us, there exists a huge power divide between the countries you come from and this one. And you’re negotiating that when you’re so young.”
“This was the international community that I didn’t know I needed in New York,” Fernandes added. “Coming from India, universities are opening up their arms to you. They talk about diversity. They talk about representation. But living here is a very new and very different experience. And so I think I-House has given us both that rich community.”
Desai agreed, but later noted one key difference between their stays at I-House: “There was no I-House Book Club when I was here!” she said. “Why didn’t I think of that?”