Anita Desai

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Anita Desai

Born June 24, 1937 (1937-06-24) (age 70)
Mussoorie, India
Occupation Author
Nationality Indian
Writing period 1970s—present
Influenced

Anita Mazumdar Desai (born June 24, 1937) is an Indian novelist and Emeritus John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been shortlisted for the Booker prize three times. Her daughter, the author Kiran Desai, won the 2006 Booker prize.

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[edit] Background

Born as Anita Mazumdar to a German mother, Toni Nime, and a Bengali businessman, D. N. Mazumdar [1] in Mussoorie, India. She grew up speaking German at home and Bengali, Urdu, Hindi and English outside the house. She first learned to read and write in English at school and as a result it became her "literary language" [2]. Despite German being her first language she did not visit Germany until later in life as an adult.

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 University of Delhi Miranda House. The following year she married Ashvin Desai, a businessman. They raised four children. Her daughter Kiran was born in Chandigarh and spent her childhood years in Bombay, on Alatamont Road. She recalls that as children they were taken to Thal (near Alibaug) for weekends, and this is where Anita Desai set her novel Village by the Sea [3].

[edit] Career

She published her first novel in 1963, Cry The Peacock. 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 [4]. 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 [5]). Her latest novel published in 2004, The Zigzag Way, is set in 20th-century Mexico.

Desai has taught at Mount Holyoke 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 University.

[edit] Film

In 1993 Merchant Ivory Productions released In Custody, directed by Ismail Merchant, with a screenplay by Shahrukh Husain. It won the 1994 President of India Gold Medal for Best Picture and stars the noted actors Shashi Kapoor, Shabana Azmi and Om Puri.

[edit] Awards

[edit] Selected works

  • The Zigzag Way (2004)
  • Diamond Dust and Other Stories (2000)
  • Fasting, Feasting (1999)
  • Journey to Ithaca (1995)
  • Baumgartner's Bombay (1988)
  • In Custody (1984)
  • The Village By The Sea (1982)
  • Clear Light of Day (1980)
  • Games at Twilight (1978)
  • Fire on the Mountain (1977)
  • Cry, The Peacock (1963)

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Anita Desai
  2. ^ A Brief Biography of Anita Desai
  3. ^ Anita Desai
  4. ^ Anita Desai-A Critical Biography
  5. ^ LitWeb.net
  • 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. (ISBN 81-88086-19-3)
  • Selvadurai, Shyam (ed.). "Anita Desai:Winterscape." Story-Wallah: A Celebration of South Asian Fiction. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005:69-90.

[edit] External links

[edit] Papers