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Anita Desai: a Profile

Anita Desai was born in 1937, in Mussoorie, India; her father was Bengali and mother German. She was educated in Delhi where she received an AB in English Literature from the University of Delhi. Her published works include short stories, children's books, and eight novels. Two of the novels, Clear Light of Day (1980) and In Custody (1984), were short-listed for the Booker Prize. She received the Guardian Award for Children's Fiction for the novel, The Village by the Sea (1982), and the 1978 National Academy of Letters Award for Fire on the Mountain (1977).

Anita Desai is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London and she has been a member of the Advisory Board for English of the National Academy of Letters in Delhi and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has been Visiting Fellow at Girton College , Cambridge, in England, and has taught writing at Smith College and has been the Purington Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College in the United States. She is married and has four children.

Anita Desai recently joined the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies in MIT's first professorial appointment primarily in fiction writing in more than 20 years.

Anita Desai's Published Works

• 1965: Voices in the City
• 1971: Bye-Bye, Blackbird
• 1977: Fire on the Mountain
• 1978: Games at Twilight
• 1978: Where Shall we go this Summer?
• 1979: The Peacock Garden
• 1980: Clear Light of Day
• 1982: The Village by the Sea
• 1983: Cry, the Peacock
• 1984: In Custody
• 1988: Baumgartner's Bombay
• 1995: Journey to Ithaca

• Anita Desai joins MIT, October 1993.
• Anita Desai's home page at MIT.
• In Custody, the film based on Anita Desai's screenplay adaptation of her book is released in July 1994.
• Anita Desai publishes new book in 1995, called Journey to Ithaca.
• Information about the postcolonial mailing list at Penn.
• Review of In Custody at the Internet Movie Database.
• Journey to Ithaca, the jacket notes: courtesy MIT Press.
• Notes on In Custody from Brown.

• Anita Desai as an artist, Indira Sivanna. Creative Books, New Delhi, 1994.
• The novels of Margaret Atwood and Anita Desai, Sunaina Singh. Creative Books, New Delhi, 1994.
• Cultural imperialism and the Indo-English novel, Fawzia Afzal-Khan. University Park, Pa. : Pennsylvania State University Press, c1993.
• Anita Desai's fiction, Mrinalini Solanki. Delhi : Kanishka Pub. House, 1992.
• Symbolism in Anita Desai's novels, Kajali Sharma. New Delhi : Abhinav Publications, 1991.
• Carving a pattern out of chaos., Seema Jena. New Delhi : Ashish Pub. House, 1990.
• The Fiction of Anita Desai, edited by R.K. Dhawan. In SELL-Series in English language and literature, 10. New Delhi : Bahri
• Language and theme in Anita Desai's fiction, Kunj Bala Goel. Jaipur : Classic Pub. House, 1989.
• Virginia Woolf and Anita Desai : a comparative study, Asha Kanwar. New Delhi : Prestige Books, 1989.
• Voice and vision of Anita Desai, Seema Jena. New Delhi : Ashish Pub. House, 1989.
• The novels of Anita Desai, Usha Bande. New Delhi : Prestige Books, 1988.
• Stairs to the attic : the novels of Anita Desai, Jasbir Jain. Jaipur : Printwell Publishers : Exclusive distributors, Rupa Book International, 1987
• Perspectives on Anita Desai, edited by Ramesh K. Srivastava. Ghaziabad : Vimal, 1984.
• The novels of Mrs. Anita Desai : a study, B. Ramachandra Rao. New Delhi : Kalyani Publishers, c1977.
• Anita Desai; a study of her fiction, by Meena Belliappa. Calcutta, A Writers Workshop Publication, c1971.