Born: June 24, 1937, Mussoorie, India
Anita Desai is Indian novelist who is known for her studies of Indian life. Desai’s characters strive to achieve their goals in a complicated and unsympathetic world; one of her recurring themes is the struggle of women to assert their independence in a restrictive Indian society.
Desai was born Anita Mazumdar in Mussoorie, a hill station near Dehradun in northern India, to a German mother and a Bengali father. She was educated at Delhi University and received a bachelor’s degree in 1957. She married Ashvin Desai, a business executive, in 1958 and published her first novel, Cry, the Peacock, in 1963. Other novels and collections of short stories, such as Games at Twilight and Other Stories (1978), followed. Her children’s book The Village by the Sea (1982) won the 1982 Guardian Award for Children’s Fiction, presented annually by the British newspaper the Guardian. Two of her novels, Clear Light of Day (1980) and In Custody (1984), were shortlisted (made finalists) for Britain’s highest literary award, the Booker Prize. In Custody, the story of a college lecturer seeking to meet the great poet who has been his hero since childhood, was made into a motion picture in 1993 by the production team of Merchant-Ivory.
Other works by Desai include Journey to Ithaca (1995), which follows a Western couple travelling in India in search of spirituality; Fasting, Feasting (1999), about three children in an Indian family who take different paths in life; and the short-story collection Diamond Dust (2000). Desai is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1990, she received the national honour of Padma Shri, given by the government of India for service to the arts. In 1993 Desai became a writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
