Anita Desai
Anita Desai
Anita Desai is an Indian novelist and the emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. She received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Literature. She won the Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea (
"That was the way life was: it lay so quiet, so still that you put your fingers out to touch it, to stroke it. Then it leapt up and struck you full in the face so that you spun about and spun about, gasping. The flames leapt up all around, rising by inches every minute, rising in rings. (II, p78)"
"I do not recognise India of the present time where, under the banner of Hindutva, intimidation and bigotry seek to silence writers, scholars and all who believe in secular and rational thought. (2015)"
"...the moon that hung over the garden like some great priceless pearl, flawed and blemished with grey shadowy ridges as only a very great beauty can risk being. (IV, p.159)"
"When Salman Rushdie published Midnights Children, it seemed to set tongues free in India in an odd way. Suddenly, younger writers realized that they didnt need to write correct and perfect English in the English tradition, but they could use Indian English and use it for any purpose whatsoever - for writing comic books, satiric books, or even for writing serious books. (Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World, 1992)"
"I still like to read poetry before starting my work. Rilke, Cavafy, Mandelstam, Brodsky...Poets go directly to what they want to get across – they dont amble around, they cut to it with a tremendous immediacy that affects one."
"Isnt it strange how life wont flow, like a river, but moves in jumps, as if it were held back by locks that are opened now and then to let it jump forwards in a kind of flood? There are these long still stretches - nothing happens - each day is exactly like the other - plodding, uneventful - and then suddenly there is a crash - mighty deeds take place - momentous events - even if one doesn’t know it at the time - and then life subsides again into the backwaters till the next push, the next flood? That summer was certainly one of them - the summer of 47-"(I, p.42)"
