Anita Desai
Anita Desai | |
---|---|
Born | Anita Mazumdar 24 June 1937 Mussorie, India |
Occupation | Writer, professor |
Nationality | Indian |
Alma mater | University of Delhi |
Period | 1963–present |
Genre | Fiction |
Children | Kiran Desai |
Anita Mazumdar Desai (born 24 June 1937) is an Indian novelist and the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a writer she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times; she received a Sahitya Academy Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Academy, India's National Academy of Letters;[1] she won the British Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea.[2]
Contents
Early life
Anita Mazumdar was born in Mussoorie, India, to a German mother, Toni Nime, and a Bengali businessman, D. N. Mazumdar.[3] She grew up speaking German at home and Bengali, Urdu, Hindi and English outside the house. However, she did not visit Germany until later in life as an adult. She first learned to read and write in English at school and as a result English became her "literary language".[4] She began to write in English at the age of seven and published her first story at the age of nine.[3]
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.[3] 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.[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 neighbourhood in which she grew up.[5] 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.[6] 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.
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).[7] In addition, she writes for the New York Review of Books.
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.[8] 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: an Indian family story[2]
- 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[9]
- 2007 – Sahitya Akademi Fellowship[10]
- 2014 – Padma Bhushan
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)
- Journey to Ithaca (1996)
See also
References
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 "Guardian children's fiction prize relaunched: Entry details and list of past winners". guardian.co.uk 12 March 2001. Retrieved 5 August 2012.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ "A Brief Biography of Anita Desai" at the Wayback Machine (archived 5 July 2007). Melissa Culross '92 (EL 34, 1991). scholars.nus.edu.sg[dead link]
- ↑ "Notes on the Biography of Anita Desai". Elizabeth Ostberg. 12 February 2000. Haverford.edu. Retrieved 21 June 2012.
- ↑ [1]. LitWeb.net[page needed]
- ↑ Baumgartner's Bombay, Penguin 1989.
- ↑ Anita Desai at the Internet Movie Database
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.[page needed]
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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 the Internet Movie Database
- Interviews
- Jabberwock: a conversation with Anita Desai
- Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- Papers
- Articles with dead external links from August 2012
- Wikipedia articles needing page number citations from August 2012
- EngvarB from August 2014
- Use dmy dates from August 2014
- 1937 births
- Living people
- Bengali people
- Bengali Hindus
- Indian women novelists
- 21st-century women writers
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty
- Mount Holyoke College faculty
- Indian emigrants to the United States
- Fellows of Girton College, Cambridge
- University of Delhi alumni
- People from Dehradun
- American women novelists
- Guardian Children's Fiction Prize winners
- Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature
- Recipients of the Padma Shri
- 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
- 20th-century women writers