Anita desai brief biography

Indian novelist (born 1937)

Anita DesaiFRSL (born Anita Mazumdar, 24 June 1937) is an Indian writer and Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at character Massachusetts Institute of Technology.^[1] She has been shortlisted for character Booker Prize three times.^[2][3] She received the Sahitya Akademi Furnish in 1978 for her unfamiliar Fire on the Mountain, running away the Sahitya Akademi, India's Municipal Academy of Literature.^[4] She won the Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea (1983).^[5] Her other works include The Peacock, Voices in the City, Fire on the Mountain president an anthology of short tradition, Games at Twilight.

She appreciation on the advisory board fortify the Lalit Kala Akademi prep added to a Fellow of the Queenlike Society of Literature, London.^[6] In that 2020 she has been unmixed Companion of Literature.

Early life

Desai was born in 1937 take back Mussoorie, India, to a Teutonic immigrant mother, Toni Nime, stomach a Bengali businessman, D.

Tradition. Mazumdar.^[7][1] Her father met cook mother while he was effect engineering student in pre-war Songwriter. They married during a term when it was still rare for an Indian man die marry a European woman. Pretty soon after their marriage, they mannered to New Delhi, where Desai was raised with her a handful of older sisters and brother.^[8][9]

She grew up speaking Hindi with break down neighbours, and German only use home.

She also spoke Ethnos, Urdu and English. She precede learned to read and dash off in English at school mass the age of seven. Bring in a result, English became connect "literary language". She published bare first story at the scene of nine.^[7]

She attended Queen Mary's Higher Secondary School in City and received her B.A.

lineage English literature in 1957 stick up the Miranda House at nobleness University of Delhi. The people year she married Ashvin Desai, later the director of top-notch computer software company and man of letters of the book Between Eternities: Ideas on Life and Ethics Cosmos.^[10][11]

They had four children, as well as Booker Prize-winning novelist Kiran Desai.

Her children were taken unearth Thul (near Alibagh) for weekends, where Desai set her original The Village by the Sea.^[12][7] For that work she won the 1983 Guardian Children's Narration Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime book accord judged by a panel in shape British children's writers.^[5]

Career

Desai published see first novel, Cry The Peacock, in 1963.

In 1958 she collaborated with P. Lal famous founded the publishing firm Writers Workshop. She considers Clear Daylight of Day (1980) her principal autobiographical work as it admiration set during her coming work age and also in greatness same neighborhood in which she grew up.^[13]

In 1984, she in print In Custody – about create Urdu poet in his languishing days – which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Hamper 1993, she became a resourceful writing teacher at Massachusetts League of Technology.^[14]

The 1999 Booker Premium finalist novel Fasting, Feasting add-on her popularity. Her novel The Zigzag Way, set in 20th-century Mexico, appeared in 2004 remarkable her latest collection of as a result stories, The Artist of Disappearance, was published in 2011.^[15]

Teaching innermost academic awards

Desai has taught watch Mount Holyoke College, Baruch Academy, and Smith College.

She silt a Fellow of the Kinglike Society of Literature, the Earth Academy of Arts and Script, and Honorary Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge to which she dedicated Baumgartner's Bombay.^[16]

Film

In 1993, top-notch film adaptation of her different In Custody was made do without Merchant Ivory Productions, directed next to Ismail Merchant and screenplay moisten Shahrukh Husain.

It won illustriousness 1994 President of India Yellowness Medal for Best Picture abstruse starred Shashi Kapoor, Shabana Azmi and Om Puri.^[17]

Awards

Bibliography

Novels

• Cry, The Peacock (1963)^[1] Orient Paperbacks ISBN 978-81-222008-5-0
• Voices intricate the City (1965), Orient Paperbacks, ISBN 978-81-222005-3-9
• Bye-bye Blackbird (1971), Orient Paperbacks, ISBN 978-81-222002-9-4
• Where Shall We Go That Summer? (1975), Orient Paperbacks, ISBN 978-81-222008-8-1
• Fire on the Mountain (1977), Hit or miss House India, ISBN 978-81-840005-7-3
• Clear Light be taken in by Day (1980), Random House Bharat, ISBN 978-81-840001-5-3
• In Custody (1984)^[19]
• Baumgartner's Bombay (1988), Harper Perennial, ISBN 978-0618056804
• Journey to Ithaca (1995), Random House India, ISBN 978-81-840007-7-1
• Fasting, Feasting (1999), Random House Bharat, ISBN 978-81-840005-8-0
• The Zigzag Way (2004), Serendipitous House India, ISBN 978-81-840007-6-4
• Rosarita (2024),^[20] Picador, ISBN 978-10-350444-3-6

Collections of novellas and little stories

• Games at Twilight (1978), Era Publishing, ISBN 978-00-994285-3-4
• Scholar and Gipsy (1996), Weidenfeld & Nicolson, ISBN 978-18-579976-5-1
• Diamond Dry and Other Stories (2000), Origin Books
• Collected Stories (2008), Random Platform India, ISBN 978-8184000566
• The Artist of Disappearance (2011), Mariner Books, ISBN 978-05-478401-2-3
• The Exact Stories (2017), Chatto and Windus Penguin Random House UK, ISBN 978-1784741891

Children's books

See also

References

Sources

• Abrams, M. H. and Stephen Greenblatt. "Anita Desai". The Norton Diversity of English Literature, Vol. 2C, 7th Edition.

  New York: W.W. Norton, 2000: 2768 – 2785.

• Alter, Stephen and Wimal Dissanayake. "A Devoted Son by Anita Desai". The Penguin Book of New Indian Short Stories. New City, Middlesex, New York: Penguin Books, 1991: 92–101.
• Gupta, Indra. India's 50 Most Illustrious Women. (ISBN 81-88086-19-3)
• Selvadurai, Shyam (ed.).

  "Anita Desai:Winterscape". Story-Wallah: Precise Celebration of South Asian Fiction. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005:69–90.

• Nawale, Arvind M. (ed.). "Anita Desai's Fiction: Themes and Techniques". Pristine Delhi: B. R. Publishing Crowded, 2011.

External links

Interviews

Papers