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Revision as of 09:19, 22 May 2019
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Anita Desai | |
---|---|
Born | Anita Mazumdar 24 June 1937 Mussorie, Garhwal Kingdom (present-day Uttarakhand, India) |
Occupation | Writer, professor |
Nationality | Indian |
Alma mater | University of Delhi |
Period | 1963–present |
Genre | Fiction |
Children | 4, including Kiran 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.[1][2] As a writer she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times.[2] 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.[3] She won the British Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea.[4]
Early life
Desai was born in 1937 in Mussoorie, India, to a German immigrant mother, Toni Nime, and a Bengali businessman, D. N. Mazumdar.[5][1] 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 up 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.[5]
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.[6]
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.[6][5] 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.[4]
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 neighbourhood in which she grew up.[7]
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.[8]
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.[9]
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).[10]
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.[11] It won the 1994 President of India Gold Medal for Best Picture and stars Shashi Kapoor, Shabana Azmi and Om Puri.
Awards[1]
- 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[4]
- 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[12]
- 2014 – Padma Bhushan
Selected works[1]
- 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)
See also
References
- ^ a b c d "Anita Desai- Biography". British Council. Chatto & Windus. Retrieved 29 April 2018.
- ^ a b "Anita Desai". Goodreads. Goodreads. Retrieved 29 April 2018.
- ^ "Sahitya Akademi Award – English (Official listings)". Sahitya Akademi. Archived from the original on 31 March 2009.
{{cite web}}
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- ^ a b c Liukkonen, Petri. "Anita Desai". Books and Writers. Finland: Kuusankoski Public Library. Archived from the original on 14 October 2004.
{{cite web}}
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suggested) (help) - ^ a b Dr. Kajal Thakur. Man-Woman Bonding In Socio-Cultural Indian Concept. Lulu.com. pp. 9–. ISBN 978-1-329-13103-3.
- ^ Elizabeth Ostberg. "Notes on the Biography of Anita Desai" Archived 20 January 2007 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 6 October 2006. Retrieved 27 December 2006.
{{cite web}}
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suggested) (help)CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) [page needed] - ^ "A Page in the Life: Anita Desai". Retrieved 24 March 2018.
- ^ Baumgartner's Bombay, Penguin, 1989.
- ^ Anita Desai at IMDb
- ^ "Conferment of Sahitya Akademi Fellowship". Official listings, Sahitya Akademi website. Archived from the original on 1 July 2017. Retrieved 15 January 2014.
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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. (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.
- Nawale, Arvind M. (ed.). "Anita Desai's Fiction: Themes and Techniques". New Delhi: B. R. Publishing Corporation, 2011.
External links
- Anita Desai at British Council: Literature
- 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
- Anita Desai at IMDb
- Interviews
- Jabberwock: a conversation with Anita Desai
- ""You Turn Yourself into an Outsider": An interview with Anita Desai". Sampsonia Way Magazine. 14 January 2014.
- Papers
- 1937 births
- Living people
- Bengali people
- Bengali Hindus
- 21st-century American women
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty
- Mount Holyoke College faculty
- Indian emigrants to the United States
- Fellows of Girton College, Cambridge
- University of Delhi alumni
- American women novelists of Indian descent
- Guardian Children's Fiction Prize winners
- Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature
- Recipients of the Padma Shri in literature & education
- Recipients of the Sahitya Akademi Award in English
- English-language writers from India
- Indian people of German descent
- Smith College faculty
- 20th-century American novelists
- 21st-century American novelists
- Recipients of the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship
- Recipients of the Padma Bhushan in literature & education
- 20th-century American women
- Novelists from Uttarakhand
- People from Mussoorie
- 21st-century Indian women writers
- 21st-century Indian novelists
- 20th-century Indian women writers
- 20th-century Indian novelists
- Women writers from Uttarakhand
- Recipients of the Benson Medal
- 20th-century Indian dramatists and playwrights
- Indian women screenwriters
- Screenwriters from Uttarakhand
- PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction winners
- Novelists from Massachusetts