Anita Desai

Anita Desai Biography

Anita Desai is a noted Indian novelist known for the book Fire on the Mountain which won Academy awards in 1978. The same book won Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize also. At present she is 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 - Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984) and Fasting, Feasting (1999), all in fiction category, though she couldn’t win. She won the British Guardian Prize for ‘The Village by the Sea’. Neil Gunn Prize (1993), Alberto Moravia Prize for Literature (Italy) in 2000 and Benson Medal of Royal Society of Literature in 2003 are other noted honours received by Desai.

Her birth name is Anita Mazumdar, born in the year 1937 in Mussoorie. Her mother is a German and father, a Bengali businessman. She spoke German at home. But she visited Germany only in her adulthood. At school she learnt English published her first story at the age of nine. She later studied at Queen Mary's Higher Secondary School in Delhi and become graduated in English literature in the year 1957 from the Miranda House of the University of Delhi. In 1958, she married Ashvin Desai. Man Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai is their daughter.

Desai published her first novel, Cry The Peacock, in 1963. Clear Light Of Day (1980) is her semi-autobiographical work. In 1984 she published In Custody which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 1993 she became a creative writing teacher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has worked as a professor 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.

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Updated: March 20, 2014