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Anita Desai

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Anita Desai
BornAnita Mazumdar
(1937-06-24) 24 June 1937 (age 87)
Mussorie, Garhwal Kingdom (present-day Uttarakhand, India)
OccupationWriter, professor
NationalityIndian
Alma materUniversity of Delhi
Period1963–present
GenreFiction
Children4, 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]

Selected works[1]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d "Anita Desai- Biography". British Council. Chatto & Windus. Retrieved 29 April 2018.
  2. ^ a b "Anita Desai". Goodreads. Goodreads. Retrieved 29 April 2018.
  3. ^ "Sahitya Akademi Award – English (Official listings)". Sahitya Akademi. Archived from the original on 31 March 2009. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  4. ^ a b c "Guardian children's fiction prize relaunched: Entry details and list of past winners", guardian.co.uk, 12 March 2001; retrieved 5 August 2012.
  5. ^ a b c Liukkonen, Petri. "Anita Desai". Books and Writers. Finland: Kuusankoski Public Library. Archived from the original on 14 October 2004. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |dead-url= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  6. ^ a b Dr. Kajal Thakur. Man-Woman Bonding In Socio-Cultural Indian Concept. Lulu.com. pp. 9–. ISBN 978-1-329-13103-3.
  7. ^ Elizabeth Ostberg. "Notes on the Biography of Anita Desai" Archived 20 January 2007 at the Wayback Machine
  8. ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 6 October 2006. Retrieved 27 December 2006. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) [page needed]
  9. ^ "A Page in the Life: Anita Desai". Retrieved 24 March 2018.
  10. ^ Baumgartner's Bombay, Penguin, 1989.
  11. ^ Anita Desai at IMDb
  12. ^ "Conferment of Sahitya Akademi Fellowship". Official listings, Sahitya Akademi website. Archived from the original on 1 July 2017. Retrieved 15 January 2014. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |dead-url= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)

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.
Interviews
Papers
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