Information on Anita Desai

Anita Desai was born in MussooSherie, a hill station north of Delhi.She began to write in English at the age of seven, and published her first story at the age of nine. Desai was educated in Delhi at Queen Mary's Higher Secondary School and Miranda House, Delhi University, where she received in 1957 a B.A. in English literature.She had started to write short stories regularly before her marriage.Since the 1950s Desai has lived in New Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay, and other Indian cities. 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 taught at Girton College and Smith College in England, and at Mount Holyoke College in the United States. In 1993 she became a creative writing teacher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has spent there for one semester each year and the rest of her time in India. Desai is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London. She received the Guardian Award for Children's Fiction for the novel The Village by the Sea, and the 1978 National Academy of Letters Award for Fire on the Mountain.


These are some of the stories she made:


* The Peacock, 1963
* Voices in the City, 1965
* Bye-Bye, Blackbird, 1971
* The Peacock Garden, 1974
* Where Shall We Go This Summer?, 1975
* Cat on a Houseboat, 1976
* Fire on the Mountain, 1977
* Games at Twilight and Other Stories, 1978
* Clear Light of Day, 1980
* Village by the Sea, 1982
* Baumgartner's Bombay, 1988
* Journey to Ithaca, 1996
* Fasting, Feasting, 1999
* Diamond Dust, 2000
* The Zigzag Way: A Novel, 2004