Anita Desai

Standard Name: Desai, Anita
Birth Name: Anita Mazumdar
Married Name: 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.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
271
She believes, like Virginia Woolf , that the great mind is androgynous . . . undivided and therefore fully, wholly creative and powerful.
qtd. in
Mann, Harveen Sachdeva. “Going in the Opposite Direction: Female Recusancy in Anita Desais Voices in the CityPostcolonial Literatures: Achebe, Ngugi, Desai, Walcott, edited by Michael Parker and Roger Starkey, St Martins Press, 1995, pp. 155-75.
160
Indian critics have seen her as leading a new feminist tendency in Indian writing in English.
Colour photograph of Anita Desai, in France, wearing a patterned sari or wrap, 5 March 1991.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Intertextuality and Influence Ella Wheeler Wilcox
In 1951, however, the poet Louise Bogan set out to recuperate her as the founder of a whole feminine school of rather daring verse on the subject of feminine and masculine emotions.
qtd. in
Watts, Emily Stipes. The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945. University of Texas Press, 1977.
144
Emily Stipes Watts
Intertextuality and Influence Flora Annie Steel
An early study of FAS 's writings was A Star of India by Daya Patwardhan , complete with a bibliographical list of her works and investigation of her real-life sources.
Powell, Violet. Flora Annie Steel: Novelist of India. Heinemann, 1981.
69
Violet Powell, who admires...
Intertextuality and Influence Kamila Shamsie
She has named a number of authors with impact on her teenage years, including Kazuo Ishiguro , Anita Desai , and Peter Carey
Shamsie, Kamila. “A long, loving literary line”. theguardian.com, 1 May 2009.
. She has expressed particular affinity for Salman Rushdie 's Midnight's Children...
Textual Production E. M. Forster
The novel which EMF abandoned unfinished, Arctic Summer, appeared with a foreword by Anita Desai in 2003.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Textual Production Susan Hill
The anthology of British women writers she published in 1990 with Michael Joseph as The Parchment Moon: An Anthology of Modern Women's Short Stories was reprinted the following year as The Penguin Book of Modern...

Timeline

10 October 2006: Kiran Desai won the Man Booker Prize for...

Writing climate item

10 October 2006

Kiran Desai won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction for her novel The Inheritance of Loss.
“The Man Booker Prize: Prize Archive 2006”. The Man Booker Prize.
McConville, Brigid. “Born to write”. Mslexia, No. 32, Jan. 2007, pp. 9-12.
9-10
“Tears, tiffs and triumphs”. Guardian Unlimited, 6 Sept. 2008.

Texts

Desai, Anita. Baumgartner’s Bombay. Heinemann, 1988.
Desai, Anita. Bye-Bye, Blackbird. Hind Pocket Books, 1971.
Desai, Anita. Clear Light of Day. Heinemann; Harper and Row, 1980.
Desai, Anita. Cry, the Peacock. Peter Owen, 1963.
Desai, Anita. Diamond Dust. Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
Desai, Anita. Fasting, Feasting. Chatto and Windus, 1999.
Desai, Anita. Fasting, Feasting. Vintage, 2000.
Desai, Anita. Fire on the Mountain. Heinemann; Allied Publishers, 1977.
Desai, Anita. Games at Twilight. Heinemann, 1978.
Desai, Anita. In Custody. Heinemann; Harper and Row, 1984.
Desai, Anita, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. “Introduction”. Turkish Embassy Letters, edited by Malcolm Jack and Malcolm Jack, University of Georgia Press, 1993, p. vii - xxxvii.
Desai, Anita. Journey to Ithaca. Heinemann; A. A. Knopf, 1995.
Desai, Anita. The Artist of Disappearance. Chatto and Windus, 2011.
Desai, Anita. “The Indian Writer’s Problems”. Perspectives on Anita Desai, edited by Ramesh K. Srivastava, Vimal Prakashan, 1984, pp. 1-4.
Desai, Anita. The Zigzag Way. Chatto and Windus, 2004.
Desai, Anita. Voices in the City. Peter Owen, 1965.
Desai, Anita. Where Shall We Go This Summer?. Vikas, 1975.