Anita Desai author biography, plus links to books by Anita Desai.

Anita Desai

Novelist, short-story writer, and children's author Anita Desai was born in 1937 in Mussoorie, India. She was educated at Delhi University.

Her novels include Fire on the Mountain (1977), which won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize; Clear Light of Day (1980); In Custody (1984); and Fasting, Feasting (1999), each of which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In Custody was made into a film by Merchant Ivory productions. Her children's book The Village by the Sea (1982), won the Guardian Children's Fiction Award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Girton College, Cambridge and Clare Hall, Cambridge.

Anita Desai lives in the United States, where she is the John E. Burchard Professor of Writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.

This biography was last updated on 12/06/2011.

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