Anita Desai

Anita Desai , born Anita Mazumdar (born 24 June 1937), is an Indian novelist and the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a writer she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. She received a Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters. She won the British Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea (1983). Her other works include The Peacock, Voices in the City, Fire on the Mountain and an anthology of short stories, Games at Twilight. She is on the advisory board of the Lalit Kala Akademi and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, London.
Early life
Desai was born in 1937 in Mussoorie, India, to a German immigrant mother, Toni Nime, and a Bengali businessman, D. N. Mazumdar. Her Bengali father first met her German mother while he was an engineering student in pre-war Berlin; and they got married during a period when it was still unusual for an Indian man to marry a European woman. Shortly after their marriage, they moved to New Delhi, where Desai was raised with her two elder sisters and brother.
She grew up speaking Hindi with her neighbours, and only German at her home. She also spoke Bengali, Urdu and English out of her house. She first learned to read and write in English at school and as a result, English became her "literary language". She began to write in English at the age of seven and published her first story at the age of nine.
She was a student at Queen Mary's Higher Secondary School in Delhi and received her B.A. in English literature in 1957 from the Miranda House of the University of Delhi. The following year she married Ashvin Desai, the director of a computer software company and author of the book Between Eternities: Ideas on Life and The Cosmos.
They have four children, including Booker Prize-winning novelist Kiran Desai. Her children were taken to Thul (near Alibagh) for weekends, where Desai set her novel The Village by the Sea. For that work she won the 1983 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime book award judged by a panel of British children's writers.
Career
Desai published her first novel, Cry The Peacock, in 1963. In 1958 she collaborated with P. Lal and founded the publishing firm Writers Workshop. She considers Clear Light of Day (1980) her most autobiographical work as it is set during her coming of age and also in the same neighborhood in which she grew up.
In 1984, she published In Custody – about an Urdu poet in his declining days – which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 1993, she became a creative writing teacher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The 1999 Booker Prize finalist novel Fasting, Feasting increased her popularity. Her novel The Zigzag Way, set in 20th-century Mexico, appeared in 2004 and her latest collection of short stories, The Artist of Disappearance, was published in 2011.
Desai has taught at Mount Holyoke College, Baruch College, and Smith College. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and of Girton College, Cambridge (to which she dedicated Baumgartner's Bombay).
Film
In 1993, her novel In Custody was adapted by Merchant Ivory Productions into an English film by the same name, directed by Ismail Merchant, with a screenplay by Shahrukh Husain. It won the 1994 President of India Gold Medal for Best Picture and stars Shashi Kapoor, Shabana Azmi and Om Puri.
Awards
1978 – Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize – Fire on the Mountain
1978 – Sahitya Akademi Award (National Academy of Letters Award) – Fire on the Mountain
1980 – Shortlisted, Booker Prize for Fiction – Clear Light of Day
1983 – Guardian Children's Fiction Prize – The Village by the Sea: an Indian family story
1984 – Shortlisted, Booker Prize for Fiction – In Custody
1993 – Neil Gunn Prize
1999 – Shortlisted, Booker Prize for Fiction: Fasting, Feasting
2000 – Alberto Moravia Prize for Literature (Italy)
2003 – Benson Medal of Royal Society of Literature
2007 – Sahitya Akademi Fellowship
2014 – Padma Bhushan
Selected works
Cry, The Peacock (1963) Orient Paperbacks
Voices in the City (1965), Orient Paperbacks,
Bye-bye Blackbird (1971), Orient Paperbacks,
The Peacock Garden (1974), Mammoth Books,
Where Shall We Go This Summer? (1975), Orient Paperbacks,
Cat on a Houseboat (1976), Orient Longman,
Fire on the Mountain (1977), Random House India,
Games at Twilight (1978), Vintage Publishing,
Clear Light of Day (1980), Random House India,
The Village by the Sea (1982), Penguin India,
In Custody (1984)
Baumgartner's Bombay (1988)
Journey to Ithaca (1995), Random House India,
Scholar and Gipsey (1996), Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
Fasting, Feasting (1999), Random House India,
Diamond Dust and Other Stories (2000), Vintage Books
The Zigzag Way (2004), Random House India,
The Artist of Disappearance (2011), Mariner Books,
See also
Indian English literature
List of Indian writers
References
Sources
Abrams, M. H. and Stephen Greenblatt. "Anita Desai". The Norton Anthology 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 Modern Indian Short Stories. New Delhi, Middlesex, New York: Penguin Books, 1991: 92–101.
Gupta, Indra. India's 50 Most Illustrious Women.
Selvadurai, Shyam (ed.). "Anita Desai:Winterscape". Story-Wallah: A Celebration of South Asian Fiction. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005:69–90.
Nawale, Arvind M. (ed.). "Anita Desai's Fiction: Themes and Techniques". New Delhi: B. R. Publishing Corporation, 2011.
External links
Anita Desai discusses Fasting, Feasting on the BBC World Book Club
Voices from the Gaps
SAWNET bio
MIT page
Revisiting Anita Desai's "In Custody" for the Agrégation-Relire "Un héritage exorbitant" d'A. Desai
Interviews
Jabberwock: a conversation with Anita Desai
Papers
Anita Desai Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin
Books written by Anita Desai
1937 births
Living people
20th-century American novelists
20th-century American women writers
20th-century Indian dramatists and playwrights
20th-century Indian novelists
20th-century Indian women writers
21st-century American novelists
21st-century American women writers
21st-century Indian novelists
21st-century Indian women writers
21st-century Indian writers
American novelists of Indian descent
American women academics
American women novelists
American women writers of Indian descent
Bengali Hindus
Delhi University alumni
English-language writers from India
Fellows of Girton College, Cambridge
Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature
Guardian Children's Fiction Prize winners
Indian emigrants to the United States
Indian people of German descent
Indian women screenwriters
MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences faculty
Mount Holyoke College faculty
Novelists from Massachusetts
Novelists from Uttarakhand
PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction winners
People from Mussoorie
Recipients of the Padma Bhushan in literature & education
Recipients of the Padma Shri in literature & education
Recipients of the Sahitya Akademi Award in English
Recipients of the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship
Screenwriters from Uttarakhand
Smith College faculty
Women writers from Uttarakhand