Anita Desai was born on Anita Mazumdar, 24 June 1937 and is an Indian novelist and Emerita John E Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
15 Facts About Anita Desai
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Anita Desai has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times.
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Anita Desai received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Literature.
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Anita Desai won the 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 father met her mother while he was an engineering student in pre-war Berlin.
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Shortly after their marriage, they moved to New Delhi, where Desai was raised with her two older sisters and brother.
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Anita Desai grew up speaking Hindi with her neighbours, and German only at home.
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Anita Desai first learned to read and write in English at school at the age of seven.
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Anita Desai 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 Honorary Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge to which she dedicated Baumgartner's Bombay.