Kiran Desai was only 35 when she won the Booker for her 2006 novel "The Inheritance of Loss", the youngest woman author to do so at the time. She came close to it again last November when "The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny" was shortlisted for the coveted prize

Since hostilities erupted last month between Israel and Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group, in the shadow of the wider US-Israeli war on Iran, over 1,400 people have been killed in Lebanon, and more than 1 million have been forced to flee their homes