Anita Desai
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| Anita Desai | |
| Born: | June 24, 1937 (age 69) Mussoorie, India |
|---|---|
| Occupation: | Novelist |
| Nationality: | Indian |
| Writing period: | 1970s – present |
| Influenced: | Kiran Desai |
Anita Desai (June 24, 1937 - ) is an Indian novelist and the John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities, Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been short-listed for the Booker prize three times. Her daughter, the author Kiran Desai, is the winner of the 2006 Booker prize.
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[edit] Background
Desai was born 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 University of Delhi (Miranda House). The following year she married Ashvin Desai, a businessman and raised four children [3] before publishing her first novel in 1963, Cry The Peacock. 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 she grew up in. [4]. In 1984 she published In Custody about an Urdu poet in his declining days, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 1993 Merchant Ivory Productions released In Custody. It was directed by Ismail Merchant, with a screenplay by Shahrukh Husain. It won the 1994 President of India Gold Medal for Best Picture and stars the noted actors Shashi Kapoor, Shabana Azmi and Om Puri. Her German background shows up in her 1988 novel, Baumgarter's Bombay. Also in 1993 she became a creative writing teacher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology [5]. Her latest novel published in 2004, The Zig Zag Way is set in 20th century Mexico.
Desai has taught at Mount Holyoke 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.
[edit] Awards
- 1978 National Academy of Letters Award - Fire on the Mountain
- 1978 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize - 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
- The Zig Zag 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)
- Cry, The Peacock (1963)
[edit] See also
[edit] 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.
[edit] External links
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