“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.