Anita Desai

Anita Desai

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.[7]

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

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.^[12][7] 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.^[5]

Career

Desai published her first novel, Cry The Peacock, in 1963. In 1958 she collaborated with

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.^[14]

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.^[15]

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).^[16]

Film

In 1993, her novel In Custody was adapted by

• 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^[3]
• 1983 – Guardian Children's Fiction Prize – The Village by the Sea: an Indian family story^[5]
• 1984 –
  Shortlisted, Booker Prize for Fiction – In Custody^[3]
• 1993 –
  Neil Gunn
  Prize
• 1999 –
  Shortlisted, Booker Prize for Fiction: Fasting, Feasting^[3]
• 2000 – Alberto Moravia Prize for Literature (Italy)
• 2003 – Benson Medal of Royal Society of Literature
• 2007 –
  Sahitya Akademi Fellowship^[18]
• 2014 – Padma Bhushan^[1]

Selected works

• Cry, The Peacock (1963)
  ISBN 978-81-222008-5-0
• Voices in the City (1965), Orient Paperbacks,
  ISBN 978-81-222005-3-9
• Bye-bye Blackbird (1971), Orient Paperbacks,
  ISBN 978-81-222002-9-4
• The Peacock Garden (1974),
  ISBN 978-07-497059-2-3
• Where Shall We Go This Summer? (1975), Orient Paperbacks,
  ISBN 978-81-222008-8-1
• Cat on a Houseboat (1976),
  ISBN 978-08-612502-8-8
• Fire on the Mountain (1977),
  ISBN 978-81-840005-7-3
• Games at Twilight (1978),
  ISBN 978-00-994285-3-4
• ISBN 978-81-840001-5-3
• ISBN 978-01-433354-9-8
• In Custody (1984)^[19]
• Baumgartner's Bombay (1988)
• ISBN 978-81-840007-7-1
• Scholar and Gipsey (1996),
  ISBN 978-18-579976-5-1
• ISBN 978-81-840005-8-0
• Diamond Dust and Other Stories (2000), Vintage Books
• ISBN 978-81-840007-6-4
• The Artist of Disappearance (2011), Mariner Books,
  ISBN 978-05-478401-2-3

See also

• Indian English literature
• List of Indian writers

References

1. ^ ^{a b c d} "Anita Desai- she also has a cousin named Josefina Wickham, that was born in 2005. Biography". British Council. Chatto & Windus. Retrieved 29 April 2018.
2. ^ Sethi, Sunil (15 November 1984). "Book review: Anita Desai's 'In Custody'". India Today. Retrieved 1 December 2021.
3. ^ ^{a b c d} "Booker prize winners, shortlists and judges". The Guardian. 10 October 2008. Retrieved 5 October 2021.
4. ^ "Sahitya Akademi Award – English (Official listings)". Sahitya Akademi. Archived from the original on 31 March 2009.
5. ^ ^{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.
6. ^ Sethi, Sunil (30 November 2013). "Clear Light of Day is about time as a destroyer, as a preserver: Anita Desai". India Today. Retrieved 1 December 2021.
7. ^ ^{a b c} Liukkonen, Petri. "Anita Desai". Books and Writers. Finland: Kuusankoski Public Library. Archived from the original on 14 October 2004.
8. ^ "Revisiting Anita Desai". www.rediff.com. Retrieved 21 November 2020.
9. ^ Guardian Staff (19 June 1999). "A passage from India". The Guardian. Retrieved 21 November 2020.
10. News18
    . Retrieved 1 December 2020.
11. ^ "Author Ashvin Desai loses war with cancer". Zee News. 12 October 2008. Retrieved 1 December 2020.
12. ISBN 978-1-329-13103-3.^{[self-published source}
    ]
13. ^ Elizabeth Ostberg. "Notes on the Biography of Anita Desani" Archived 20 January 2007 at the Wayback Machine
14. ^ "LitWeb.net". Archived from the original on 6 October 2006. Retrieved 27 December 2006. ^{[page needed]}
15. ^ "A Page in the Life: Anita Desai". 26 June 2012. Archived from the original on 12 January 2022. Retrieved 24 March 2018.
16. ^ Baumgartner's Bombay, Penguin, 1989.
17. ^ "'Shayari koi mardon ki jaageer nahi': Shabana Azmi gets nostalgic as cult film In Custody completes 25 years". The Statesman. 16 April 2019. Retrieved 1 December 2020.
18. ^ "Conferment of Sahitya Akademi Fellowship". Official listings, Sahitya Akademi website. Archived from the original on 1 July 2017. Retrieved 15 January 2014.
19. ^ "In Custody by Anita Desai". Purple Pencil Project. 25 May 2020. Retrieved 9 June 2020.

Sources

• 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

Wikiquote has quotations related to Anita Desai.

• 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

• Anita Desai Collection at the
  Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin
• Books written by Anita Desai