Anita Desai

Anita Desai
Born	Anita Mazumdar 24 June 1937 (1937-06-24) Mussoorie, India
Occupation	Author/Professor
Nationality	Indian
Alma mater	University of Delhi
Period	1970s—present
Genres	Fiction
Children	Kiran Desai

Anita Mazumdar Desai (born 24 June 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, was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, in 1978 for her novel, Fire on the Mountain, by the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters.

Background

Born as Anita Mazumdar to a German mother, Toni Nime, and a Bengali businessman, D. N. Mazumdar 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". Despite German being her first language she did not visit Germany until later in life as an adult. 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.

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. 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. Her novel, The Zigzag Way (2004), is set in 20th-century Mexico and her latest novel The Artist of Disappearance came 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 University (to which she dedicated Baumgartner's Bombay). In addition, she writes for the New York Review of Books.

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. And great film producer amit kumar singh from nabada

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
• 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

Selected works

• The Artist Of Disappearance (2011)
• 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)
• Cat on a Houseboat (1976)
• Where Shall We Go This Summer? (1975)
• The Peacock Garden (1974)
• Bye-bye Blackbird (1971)
• Voices in the City (1965)
• Cry, The Peacock (1963)
• India- A Travellers Literary Companion

• Indian English literature
• List of winners and shortlisted authors of the Booker Prize for Fiction

References

• 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.
• http://kirjasto.sci.fi/desai.htm

External links

• Biography
• Anita Desai discusses Fasting, Feasting on the BBC World Book Club
• Voices from the Gaps
• SAWNET bio
• MIT page
• Jabberwock: a conversation with Anita Desai
• Anita Desai at the Internet Movie Database
• Revisiting Anita Desai's "In Custody" for the Agrégation-Relire "Un héritage exorbitant" d'A. Desai

Papers

• Anita Desai Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin