Anita Desai

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Anita Desai
Born Anita Mazumdar
June 24, 1937 (1937-06-24) (age 72)
Mussoorie, India
Occupation Author
Nationality Indian
Writing period 1970s—present
Genres Fiction

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.

Contents

[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 Miranda House of the University of Delhi . The following year she married Ashvin Desai, a businessman. 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 [1].

[edit] Career

Desai published her first novel, Cry The Peacock, in 1963. 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 [3]. 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[4]. Her latest novel, The Zigzag Way (2004), is set in 20th-century Mexico.

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 University. In addition, she writes for the New York Review of Books.

[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 Shashi Kapoor, Shabana Azmi and Om Puri.

[edit] Awards

  • 1978 - National Academy of Letters Award - Fire on the Mountain
  • 1978 - Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize - Fire on the Mountain
  • 1978 - Sahitya Akademi 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
  • 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)

[edit] Selected works

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b Anita Desai
  2. ^ A Brief Biography of Anita Desai
  3. ^ Anita Desai-A Critical Biography
  4. ^ 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

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