Anita Desai

Anita Desai, conceived Anita Mazumdar (conceived 24 June 1937) is an Indian writer and the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technoogy.As an author she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times.She got a Sahitya Academi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Academi, India's National Academy of Letters.She won the British Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea.

Desai was brought into the world in Mussoorie, India, and spent her youth in Delhi. Her folks had met in Germany when her dad was concentrating there, and they moved back to his home of India during the 1920s. Desai grew up communicating in German, Bengali, Hindu, and Urdu; she possibly educated English when she went to a mission school. She at that point went to class at Queen Mary's School in Delhi and got a B.A. in English writing from Miranda House at the University of Delhi.

In 1958, Anita wedded Ashwin Desai, a business leader, and they had four kids (Kiran Desai, one of her girls, won the Man Booker Prize in 2006).

Desai distributed her first short story when she was just twenty years of age. Her first novel was Cry, the Peacock (1963). Her different books include: Voices around there (1965), Bye-Bye, Blackbird (1971), Where Shall We Go This Summer? (1975), Fire on the Mountain (1977), Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984), Baumgartner's Bombay (1988), and The Zigzag Way (2004). Notwithstanding books, she has composed books for kids, various short stories that have been gathered into collections, and articles.

Desai has gotten numerous honors, including the Royal Society of Literature Winifred Holtby Prize (1978), the Sahitya Akademi of India Award (1979), the Guardian Award for Children's Fiction (1982), the National Academy of Letters Award, and three assignments for the Booker Prize. She has instructed at Cambridge, Oxford, Smith, Mount Holyoke, and MIT; she is additionally an individual from the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Desai and her family at present live in the United States.

Awards

1978 – Winifred HoltbyMemorial 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

1983 – Guardian Children's Fiction Prize – The Village by the Sea: an Indian family story

1984 – Shortlisted, Booker Prize for Fiction – In Custody

1993 – Neil Gunn Prize

1999 – Shortlisted, Booker Prize for Fiction: Fasting,Feasting

2000 – Alberto Moravia Prize for Literature (Italy)

2003 – Benson Medal of Royal Society of Literature

2007 – Sahitya Akademi Fellowship

2014 – Padma Bhushan