Desai, Anita (1937– )

Indian novelist. Her calm, sensitive, and often humorous style is much admired. Her early novels concentrate on the internal workings of the mind, often the mind of a woman trying to make time and a place for herself in Indian society. She has sometimes been accused of being a ‘subjective writer’ – one who does not place their characters in the wider world – but such accusations dismiss the importance of women's struggles in a male-dominated society.

Desai was born in Mussoorie, Uttar Pradesh, India. Her father was Bengali and her mother German. She married soon after her graduation from Delhi University in 1957 and her first novels were written while her children were small. She won international fame and popularity with Fire on the Mountain (1977) and Clear Light of Day (1980) and with the imaginative stories of the tension within families in Games at Twilight (1978). Clear Light of Day, In Custody (1984), and Fasting, Feasting (1999) were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She won the Guardian Award for Children's Fiction in 1982 for The Village by the Sea.

Later novels include Baumgartner's Bombay (1988), the story of a German washed up on the seashore of India which tackles the horrors of Nazism, and Journey to Ithaca (1995). She published a collection of short stories, Diamond Dust and other Stories, in 2000. She is a member of the Advisory Board for English in Delhi and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London, and was awarded the Neil Gunn International Fellowship for 1994. Desai lives in the United States, and was the John E Burchard Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 1993–2002.