Anita Desai received a Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters.
14 Facts About Anita Desai
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Anita Desai won the British Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea.
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Anita Desai is on the advisory board of the Lalit Kala Akademi and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, London.
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Anita Desai's Bengali father first met her German mother while he was an engineering student in pre-war Berlin; and they got married during a period when it was still unusual for an Indian man to marry a European woman.
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Shortly after their marriage, they moved to New Delhi, where Desai was raised with her two elder sisters and brother.
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Anita Desai grew up speaking Hindi with her neighbours, and only German at her home.
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Anita Desai spoke Bengali, Urdu and English out of her house.
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Anita Desai first learned to read and write in English at school and as a result, English became her "literary language".
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Anita Desai began to write in English at the age of seven and published her first story at the age of nine.
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Anita Desai's children were taken to Thul for weekends, where Desai set her novel The Village by the Sea.
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Anita Desai published her first novel, Cry The Peacock, in 1963.
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Anita Desai considers Clear Light of Day her most autobiographical work as it is set during her coming of age and in the same neighborhood in which she grew up.
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Anita Desai has taught at Mount Holyoke College, Baruch College, and Smith College.
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Anita Desai is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and of Girton College, Cambridge.