Daily Almanac for
Feb 14, 2012
Search: Infoplease Info search tips
Search: Biographies Bio search tips
| Share
 

Anita Desai

writer
Born: 6/24/1937
Birthplace: India

Born to parents of Indian and German heritage, Desai grew up in New Delhi, India. She spoke German at home, and Urdu and Hindi to friends and neighbors. In school, she read and wrote in English. She received her B.A. in English literature from the University of Delhi. She has written more than a dozen adult and children's books, notably Fire on the Mountain (1977), for which she received the National Academy of Letters award in India, Clear Light of Day (1980), and The Village by the Sea (1983), which received the Guardian Prize for Children's fiction. Her novels In Custody (1984) and Baumgartner's Bombay (1988) exemplify her liberal ideas and interest in the outsider. Her 1999 novel Fasting, Feasting was the third of her works shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She lives in Massachusetts with her family and teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


Information Please® Database, © 2007 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.

    • Cite
    • Print
    • Bookmark

More on Anita Desai from Infoplease:


Premium Partner Content
HighBeam Research

Related content from HighBeam Research on: Anita Desai

What Use Is Anita Desai? (Tehelka)

A Winning Inheritance Anita Desai's daughter pulls off a stunning Booker Prize victory, proving conclusively that the literary gene can be passed down (India Today)

Claustrophobia at Home - Family tensions make Anita Desai's characters' attempts to transcend domestic lives into personal triumphs or tragedies.(Review) (The World and I)

Testing the limits of the Transcultural: travel, intertextuality and tourism in Bharati Mukherjee's The Holder of the World and Anita Desai's The Zigzag Way/kulturlerustu'nun sinirlarini zorlamak: Bharati Mukherjee'nin The Holder of the World ve Anita Desai'nin The Zigzag Way adli eserlerinde yolculuk, metinler-arasilik ve turizm.(Critical essay) (Interactions)

Scholarship and integrity: Matthew Arnold's "The Scholar-Gipsy" and Anita Desai's "Scholar and Gypsy".(Critical essay) (Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics)

In a transnational world: exploring gendered subjectivity, mobility, and consumption in Anita Desai's Fasting, Feasting.(Critical essay) (ARIEL)

Postnational feminisms; postcolonial identities and cosmopolitanism in the works of Kamala Markandaya, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Anita Desai.(Brief article)(Book review) (Reference & Research Book News)

THE BOOKS INTERVIEW: Anita Desai (New Statesman (1996))

Other worlds, other texts: teaching Anita Desai's 'Clear Light of Day' to Canadian students. (Third World Women's Inscriptions) (College Literature)

Kiran Desai: icon of the new breed of writers.(BOOK WORLD) (The World and I)

Additional search results provided by HighBeam Research, LLC. © Copyright 2005. All rights reserved.

A free, reliable Q&A site for homework help. Answerplease.com

24 X 7

Private Tutor

Click Here for Details
24 x 7 Tutor Availability
Unlimited Online Tutoring
1-on-1 Tutoring