Anita Desai

Anita Desai
Born	Anita Mazumdar 24 June 1937 (age 73) Mussoorie, India
Occupation	Author
Nationality	Indian
Alma mater	University of Delhi
Period	1970s—present
Genres	Fiction

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.^[1]

Background

Born as Anita Mazumdar to a German mother, Toni Nime, and a Bengali businessman, D. N. Mazumdar^[2] 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".^[3] 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, 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.^[2]

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.^[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, 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 (to which she dedicated Baumgartner's Bombay).^[6] 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.

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 ^[7]

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)
• Where Shall We Go This Summer? (1975)
• Bye-bye Blackbird(1971)
• Cry, The Peacock (1963)