Anita Desai

Anita Desai is a Novelist and a professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She wrote novels and books for children. She has written almost 15 novels. Her birth was on the 24th June 1937 in Mussorie, India and she was brought up in Jaipur, India. Her mother was from Germany and named Toni Nime and her father was a Bengali Businessman named D N Majumdar. She started her schooling and wrote her first story at the tender age of seven and got it published at nine.

She learned English, Hindi, Urdu, and German at home. She was a student at Queens Marry Higher Secondary School, New Delhi and completed her graduation in BA from Miranda House, Delhi University in literature as she had an interest in it. Then she got married to Asvini Desai who is the director of a software company and a novelist as well. She has four children, and one of them is a writer. She wrote her first novel in 1963 called Cry the Peacock. She had a great style of writing, and her characters looked very real and practical, and people find them relatable. She then wrote Voices in the City in the year 1965.

Her other novels include The Peacock Garden and Where Shall We Go this Summer, and this novel got a lot of appreciation from the audience. She also wrote Games at Twilight and Games at the Mountains which had a good response from the people. She won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and the Sahitya Academy Award for Fire on the Mountains. She wrote The Village Story soon >> Read More... by the Sea in the year 1982 and received the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. She worked on Clear Light of the Day which tells the youth about the importance of the family and especially to women about their role as a mother and caretakers in modern India.

She wrote The Custody; this novel got shortlisted for the Bookers Prize in 1984. Merchant Ivory Production made a film on the story of this book and the film was given the Presidents Medal for Best Picture. She wrote Fasting, Feasting in the year 1999. The fiction was again shortlisted for Bookers Prize in the year 1999. Zig Zag Story soon >> Read More... came up in the year 2004 which is about a man discovering his passion for writing. Her last novel as of now is The Artist Click to look into! >> Read More... of Disappearance published in 2011.

Her daughter, Kiran Desai Kiran Desai was born in Chandigarh, the capital of >> Read More... , is also an Author and she won the Bookers Prize in the year 2006 for The Loss of Inheritance. Anita Desai currently lives in the USA. She received Awards like Benson Medal of Royal Society of Literature in 2003 and Sahitya Academy Fellowship in 2007 and the third-highest honor of civilians, Padma Bhushan, in the year 2011. Her fans are expecting much more from her.