Anita Desai

AD , an Indian writer of partly European descent who has lived in both England and the USA (where she is now settled), focuses her psychologically-oriented novels on the predicaments of women, immigrants and displaced individuals of both sexes, and declining urban populations. Her sensitive and poetic prose engages with the social and political consequences of independence and imperialism in de-colonizedIndia. AD has also issued short stories, children's books, and a screenplay. She believes, like Virginia Woolf , that the great mind is androgynous . . . undivided and therefore fully, wholly creative and powerful. Indian critics have seen her as leading a new feminist tendency in Indian writing in English.