ANITA DESAI is one of the world's best-known authors, and a writer who has influenced generations of writers (starting right at home: her daughter Kiran Desai's novel was a celebrated debut in 1997).
Since 1993, she has been teaching in MIT's Program in Writing (the first professorial appointment by the university in fiction writing in 20 years).
Anita 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.
Links:
In -depth
Desai site by Anoop Sarkar of Univ. of Pennsylvania