Anita Desai

Anita Desai (born Anita Mazumdar; 1937) is an Indian novelist and the emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. She received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Literature. She won the Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea. Her other works include Cry, the Peacock, Voices in the City (1963), Fire on the Mountain (1977) and an anthology of short stories, Games at Twilight (1978). She is on the advisory board of the Lalit Kala Akademi and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, London. Since 2020 she has been a Companion of Literature.

Early life Desai was born in 1937 in Mussoorie, India, to a German immigrant mother, Toni Nime, and a Bengali businessman, D. N. Mazumdar.

She grew up speaking Hindi with her neighbours, and German only at home. She also spoke Bengali, Urdu and English. She first learned to read and write in English at school at the age of seven. As a result, English became her "literary language". She published her first story at the age of nine.

They had 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.

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.

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.

Teaching and academic awards

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 Honorary Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge to which she dedicated Baumgartner's Bombay.

Film In 1993, a film adaptation of her novel In Custody was made by Merchant Ivory Productions, directed by Ismail Merchant and screenplay by Shahrukh Husain. It won the 1994 President of India Gold Medal for Best Picture and starred 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 2014 – Padma Bhushan Baumgartner's Bombay (1988), Harper Perennial, Journey to Ithaca (1995), Random House India, Fasting, Feasting (1999), Random House India, The Zigzag Way (2004), Random House India, Rosarita (2024), Picador,

Collections of novellas and short stories Games at Twilight (1978), Vintage Publishing, Scholar and Gipsy (1996), Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Diamond Dust and Other Stories (2000), Vintage Books Collected Stories (2008), Random House India, The Artist of Disappearance (2011), Mariner Books, The Complete Stories (2017), Chatto and Windus Penguin Random House UK,

Children's books The Peacock Garden (1974), Mammoth Books, Cat on a Houseboat (1976), Orient Longman, The Village by the Sea (1982), Penguin India,