Anita Desai

Anita Desai is an Indian novelist whose fiction, written in English and set between India and the world, has been nominated three times for the Booker Prize. Her novels — Baumgartner's Bombay, a portrait of a lonely refugee in the city he adopted, and Clear Light of the Day, the emotional fissure in a Delhi family — are among the essential works of modern Indian literature.

Desai taught and lectured at British and American universities for decades and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her fiction is admired for its fine-grained inner lives, its rendering of memory and family, and its distrust of cliché; she has been a formative influence on two generations of Indian authors.