Anita Desai |
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Anita Desai was born in 1937; her father was Bengali and her mother German, and she was educated in Delhi. Her publihsed work includes Clear Light of Day, which was shortlisted for the 1980 Booker Prize, Fire on the Mountain, for which she won the Royal Society of Literature's Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and the 1978 National Academy of Letters Award, In Custody, which was shortlisted for the 1984 Booker Prize, a volume of short stories, Games at Twilight, and Baumgartner's Bombay, all of which are publihsed in Penguin. She has also written several books for children. She is a member of the Advisory Board for English of the National Academy of Letters in Delhi and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London. She was awarded the Neil Gunn International Fellowship for 1994. Anita Desai is married, has four children, and lives in India.
Name
Anita Desai
When were you born?
24th June 1937, Mussoorie India
What’s your favourite book?
Different ones all the time. Just one single one? Hard to choose amongst so many - but perhaps To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
What’s your favourite film?
‘Pather Panchali’ by Satyajit Ray and ‘Seventh Seal’ by Bergman
What’s your favourite song?
I really don’t have one
What’s your most treasured possession?
My house, I suppose
When did you start writing?
When I learnt how to at age 7
Where do your ideas and inspirations come from?
One stumbles across them in places one knows or goes to, people one meets, experiences one has
My tips for becoming a successful author:
Read, read, read
Learn to be a good critic - of what you read and above all of what you write
What’s your favourite place in the world and why?
Allow me two, or three: Venice in Italy, Cambridge in England and a small hill town in the high desert of Mexico
What are your hobbies?
Working in my garden
If you hadn’t been an author, what do you think you would have been?
I would be sad and have an empty life if I weren’t a writer
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