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Anita Desai India PWF 2012
“One had only to be silent, aware, observe and perceive.”
The eminent novelist Anita Desai was born in 1937 in Mussoorie, India. Her work embodies the belief that East and West are parallel, not contrasting worlds. “No matter where you travel you come across the same hungers and needs.”
Desai’s prose is distinguished by her patient eye, by her humane, penetrating intelligence—especially, by her eternal return to India.
“The ancient Chinese believed time is not a ladder one ascends into the future, but a ladder one descends into the past.”
Anita Desai insists on the persistence of memory—focusing on forgotten, vanishing worlds, art and language that exist on the margins.
Nominated three times for the Booker Prize—for Clear Light of Day, In Custody, and Fasting, Feasting—Desai’s work also includes: Fire on the Mountain, Games at Twilight, Baumgartner’s Bombay, Diamond Dust and Other Stories, The Zigzag Way, and The Artist of Disappearance.
Anita Desai lives in Cold Spring, New York.
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-petr-machan,-pwf-(4)-4fb3a7099f84a_150x94.jpg "Anita Desai by Petr Machan, Prague Writers' Festival")
-petr-machan,-pwf-2012-(12)-4fdafd1146c1b_150x94.jpg "Anita Desai © Petr Machan, Prague Writers' Festival")
Anita Desai | One Doesn't Want to Lose the Beauty
18.01.2012 Interviews
Kiran Desai In Custody was set in the Old Delhi of your childhood, but what did you know of the Germany of your mother, the East Bengal of your father? Did you know your grandparents?
Anita Desai | Solitary Lives, Abruptly Interrupted
11.01.2012 Articles
The crumbling, all but abandoned manor house as symbol of a social order in distress: the English may have invented that notion, but their former colonial subjects in India have also proved adept at employing it as a literary device.
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