Anita Desai

Born to a Bengali father and a German mother in the hill station of Mussoorie, Anita Desai grew up in New Delhi, where she learned German and Bengali at home, Hindi and Urdu in the streets, and English in school. She began writing stories at just seven years old—she even illustrated them and learned to bind them together into books, which she gave to her family members as gifts. Her earliest and strongest literary influences were mainly Western novelists like Virginia Woolf and Henry James—she has cited Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as one of her favorite books as a child. Desai also remembers how Old Delhi rioted and many of her schoolmates left as refugees when India and Pakistan became separate, independent nations in the Partition of 1947. She studied English literature at the University of Delhi and graduated in 1957. The next year, she moved to Kolkata, married the businessman Ashvin Desai, and co-founded the Writers Workshop publishing company with several other Indian authors. She began publishing novels in the early 1960s and has not stopped since. But her most productive period was between 1974 and 1984, when she published eight novels—including her autobiographical 1980 novel Clear Light of Day and In Custody, which were both finalists for the prestigious Booker Prize and launched her to international prominence. In fact, she was a finalist for the prize a third time in 1999 for Fasting, Feasting; because the jury was bitterly divided over whether to award the prize to Desai or to its eventual winner, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, it took the unusual step of naming Fasting, Feasting as a runner-up. Desai has also won India’s two highest literary awards, the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship, as well as its third-highest award for civilians in general, the Padma Bhushan. In addition to the Indian cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chandigarh, and Pune, Desai has also lived in England, the U.S., and Mexico. Since the 1990s, she has taught at several universities in the northeastern United States (most recently M.I.T.). Her daughter Kiran Desai is also a noted novelist best known for The Inheritance of Loss (2006).