Anita Desai

Anita Desai was born June 24, 1937 in India to a German mother and an Indian father. She grew up during World War II and could see the anxiety her German mother was experiencing about the situation and her family in Germany. After the war when she realized the Germany she had known was devasted, her mother never returned there, nor had any desire to return. Anita herself did not visit until she was an adult. She has taught at Mt. Holyoke and Smith Colleges and is a member of the Advisory Board for English in New Delhi. She currently teaches writing at MIT. She is married and has four children, including Kiran Desai.
Desai's own home page at MIT
Profile from the SAJA web site
Interview by Magda Costa, Jan 2001.
Anita Desai reading at MIT.

Newsclips/Articles

Fasting, Feasting is shortlisted for Booker Prize. Sep 99.

Desai film to premiere. MIT Press, July 1994.

Noted novelist joins writing faculty. MIT Press, Sep 1993.

Bio and description from Pegasos.

Bibliography



The Zig-Zag Way
Houghton Mifflin (2004)

Desai paints a subtle, miniaturist portratit of twentieth-century Mexico as experienced by a young American man. A newly minted historian, Eric has come to Mexico as a first-time traveler. At first overcome by sensory overload, he is gradually seduced by the strangeness, the color, the mysteries of an ancient world. He finds himself on a curious quest for his own family in an old mining town, where a hundred years earlier young Cornish miners toiled without relief. The native Indians who now suffer the same labor have found an unlikely savior: the formidable Queen of the Sierra, Doña Vera, widow of a mining baron with a colorful, dubious, European past.

With vivid sympathy and telling detail, Desai conjures Eric's grandparents and the poignant story of a young English girl whose grave is in a cemetery on a Mexican hillside. At the feast of the Day of the Dead, when the locals celebrate and remember their departed, the zigzag paths of these lives converge, bringing together past and present in a moment of powerful epiphany

Sawnet Review by Champa Bilwakesh

Review in the Times, UK

Snakes and Ladders. Maya Jaggi in the Guardian.

Another Guardian review

Review in desijournal.

Fasting, Feasting
(1999)

Review in Salon.

Review of Fasting, Feasting by Man from Matunga.

Fasting, Feasting, reviewed by Lakshmi Chandra in Feminista.

Journey to Ithaca
Heinemann. (1995)

Journey to Ithaca, reviewed by Richard Bernstein in the New York Times.

Journey to Ithaca, reviewed by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison in the New York Times.

Baumgartner's Bombay
(1988)

Baumgartner's Bombay, review by Michiko Kakatuni in the New York Times.

Baumgartner's Bombay, review by Paul West in the New York Times.

In Custody
Penguin (1984)

In Custody. Review by John Gross in the New York Times.

In Custody. Review by A.G.Mojtabai in the New York Times

Clear Light of Day
(1982)

Cry the Peacock
(1980)

Games at Twilight and Other Stories
(1978)



Fire on the Mountain
Penguin (1977)

Sawnet Review by Pratibha Ghogale-Kelapure

Bye Bye Blackbird
(1971)

Voices in the City
(1965)

Children's Books



The Village By the Sea
Allied Publishers, 1982. ()

Lila is 13 and her brother Hari 12, yet as the eldest children of a family fallen on hard times they feel responsible for looking after their young sisters. Their mother is seriously ill, and their father, out of work, spends most of his time drunk. Lila and Hari desperately seek to keep the family together. Then one day Hari goes to Bombay, and suddenly things begin to change. The story is set in Thul, a small fishing village near Bombay. It won the Guardian Children's Fiction Award in 1983.

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South Asian Women authors
Sawnet Bookshelf
Sawnet