Kiran Desai explored loneliness and connection across space and time at the Hammer Museum on Thursday.

Desai – the Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of “Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard” and “The Inheritance of Loss” – spoke with UCLA professor Mona Simpson in this year’s final iteration of Simpson’s “Some Favorite Writers” series. Desai read the opening pages of her third novel, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.” Desai said her newest book chronicles the love story between Sonia and Sunny, two young Indian students living in the United States, while delving into the various forms of loneliness in their lives .

“As I wrote across geographies and generations, I realized I could widen the scope of my novel to write about loneliness in a much broader sense – not just romantic loneliness but the huge divides of class and race, the distrust between nations and the swift vanishing of a past world,” Desai said.

Following an introduction from Simpson, Desai read a passage about the interaction between Sonia’s grandfather and aunt. After learning that Sonia has felt lonely since coming to Bennington College in Vermont – Desai’s alma mater – the characters reach out to her over the phone. Lilia Valdez, a doctoral student in the School of Education and Information Studies and event attendee, said listening to Desai’s reading elevated the source material.

“I read the book on my own, so to hear her audibly go through it and how she imagined the story to be told tonally … it gave them more life than I would have,” Valdez said.

Sanjeev Varma, a fourth-year world arts and cultures student, said he connected with the depiction of Indian culture and families from the reading – particularly because he was also from Northwest India and could understand the terminology used by the characters.

Afterward, Desai answered a series of questions from Simpson and audience members and spoke about the complexities of telling Indian stories in a nuanced manner, the different forms of loneliness across cultures and the practices of her writing process. She added that fine art is a strong source of inspiration as a writer.

“If I’m not writing, I’m going to museums,” Desai said. “I go to museums wherever I am traveling. It is the art form I find most compatible (with writing).”

[Related: Katie Kitamura talks new novel at Hammer Museum ‘Some Favorite Writers’ event]

Desai said her novel centers on the experience of loneliness. She added that, in her personal life, she has grown to understand that belonging is not always a necessity. She said the experiences of her main characters were inspired by her time as an international student at Bennington and the periods of physical isolation she endured over school breaks. Desai added that the juxtaposition of her college experience with being surrounded by people at her home in India helped her gain a new perspective on the different forms of loneliness, which informed the writing of her novel.

“I thought it was so much about rift – difficult rifts and difficult things, too – but it is also about beautiful loneliness,” Desai said. “In all of this darkness in the world and so many things we can’t control, it is still true that people can have a love story.”

Valdez said Desai’s discussion of loneliness as an occasional necessity challenged her previous view of loneliness as a negative experience and helped her reconsider her past conceptions about connection and isolation.

Desai added that the writing process spanned 20 years, as she narrowed down the story from its original length of 5,000 pages. She added that her childhood experiences of spending idle afternoons with her family helped her cultivate the patience to write this story.

“In India, afternoons last forever, and we also learned patience and that boredom was so important to the creative process,” Desai said.

Desai said her mother Anita Desai, also an award-winning author, served as the original reader for all of her stories. She added that elements from the shared experience of Desai’s childhood – such as the veranda tree from her mother’s childhood home or an encounter with a scorpion from a trip to Mexico – have woven themselves into both of their novels. Varma said Desai’s comments about her relationship with her mother as a writer inspired and connected with him because he also has begun sharing his creative writing with his own mother.

“The realization that I’ve come to is that my home is in my work, and that it is OK not to belong,” Kiran Desai said. “It’s also a spiritual realization that it is maybe even an ethical choice not to belong.”