Anita Desai

She won the Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea (1983). 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.

Anita Desai studied at University of Delhi and Miranda House. The recorded working language is German and English. Employment is recorded with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mount Holyoke College and Smith College. Works named in the authority record are Fire on the Mountain. Distinctions recorded are Padma Bhushan in literature & education, Padma Shri in literature and education, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Sahitya Akademi Award.

Desai was born in 1937 in Mussoorie, India, to a German immigrant mother, Toni Nime, and a Bengali businessman, D. N. Mazumdar. Her father met her mother while he was an engineering student in pre-war Berlin. They married during a period when it was still unusual for an Indian man to marry a European woman. Shortly after their marriage, they moved to New Delhi, where Desai was raised with her two older sisters and brother. 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. She attended Queen Mary's Higher Secondary School in Delhi and received her B.A. in English literature in 1957 from the Miranda House at the University of Delhi. The following year she married Ashvin Desai, later the director of a computer software company and author of the book Between Eternities: Ideas on Life and The Cosmos. 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. 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.

Desai published her first novel, Cry, the Peacock, in 1963. In 1958 she collaborated with P. Lal and founded the publishing firm Writers Workshop. She considers Clear Light of Day (1980) her most autobiographical work as it is set during her coming of age and also in the same neighborhood in which she grew up. 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.

• Cry, The Peacock (1963) Orient Paperbacks • Voices in the City (1965), Orient Paperbacks, • Bye-bye Blackbird (1971), Orient Paperbacks, • Where Shall We Go This Summer? (1975), Orient Paperbacks, • Fire on the Mountain (1977), Random House India, • Clear Light of Day (1980), Random House India, • In Custody (1984) • 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,

• Abrams, M. H. and Stephen Greenblatt. "Anita Desai". The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2C, 7th Edition. New York: 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. • 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.