Quick Look:
Anita Desai
Arundhati Roy
Kiran Desai
Gita Mehta
Bapsi Sidhwa
Shauna Singh Baldwin
Gita Hariharan
Kamila Shamsie
Index
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ANITA
DESAI AND BOOKER PRIZE
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It was third time unlucky for the
Anglo-Indian writer Anita Desai since she had
been shortlisted for the coveted literary prize
thrice for In Custody and Clear
Light of the Day in 1980 and 1984
respectively and for Fasting and Feasting in
1999. She was actually third favorite to win it
in 1999 after J.M. Coetzee and Frayn and it was
eventually the South African J.M. Coetzee who won
it for the second time for his book Disgrace.
Anita Desai born in 1937 in Bombay was educated
in the capital city, Delhi. Her father was
Bengali and mother a German. Her other notable
books are Fire on the Mountain (1977),
Games At Twilight (1978) and The
Village By the Sea (1982)
Click
here to see the list of past winners of Booker
Prize
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Arundhati
Roy
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Arundhati Roy is one of the
writers credited for catapulting Anglo-Indian
writing to a new height in the literary world.
She has paved ways for younger generation of
writers who are knocking at the doors of literary
stardom.
This 37-year-old New Delhi architect won the
prestigious Booker Prize in 1996 for her debut
novel The God of Small Things. Her novel
was published in India by India Ink, a small
Indian publishing house and it has gone on to
sell more than 6 million copies in 13
countries.
She has even written screenplays for two films.
The screenplay of Malgudi Days telecasted in
Doordarshan was done by her.
Nowadays she is heavily involved in raising
voices for the underprivileged people. |
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Kiran Desai
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One of the four children of Anita Desai, she
started her literary career with her comic novel Strange
Happenings in the Guava Orchard. She was born
in 1972. Salman Rushdie thinks that another young
Indian girl has great prospect in the literary
world and he included an extract from her debut
novel in his anthology The Vintage Book of
Indian Writings.
Praise for her Hullabaloo
in the Guava Orchard:
 'Welcome proof that India's
encounter with the English language
continues to give birth to new children,
endowed with lavish gifts.'
-Salman Rushdie'Desai is a
lavish, sharp-eyes fabulist whose send-up
of small-town culture cuts to the heart
of human perversity.'
-The New Yorker
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Gita Mehta
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Gita Mehta as we all
know is the writer of novels like Raj and A
River Sutra and non-fiction books like Karma
Cola and Snakes and Ladders. But
beside that she has even written numerous
articles for various Indian, American and
European magazines and made documentaries for
European and American televisions. Her works have
been translated into thirteen languages and
published twenty-seven countries. She lives New
York, London and India. |
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Bapsi Sidhwa
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Bapsi Sidhwa was born in Karachi
and brought up in Lahore. Being an active social
worker among Asian women, she represented
Pakistan at the Asian Women's Congress in 1975.
Her novels include The Crow Eaters, The
Bride and Ice Candy-Man. She presently
lives in the US.
The Bollywood film 1947 Earth was based on her
novel Ice Candy-Man. |
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Kamila Shamsie
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Kamila Shamsie was
born in 1973 in Karachi. Her first novel In
the city by the Sea (1998) was her master
thesis at the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst and it won the John Llewelyn Rhys
Prize. It even won her the Prime Minister's Award
for literature in Pakistan in 1999. Her second
novel is titled Salt and Saffron (2000,
published by Bloomsbury in UK). Kartography,
her third novel will hit the literary world in
June 2002.
A reviewer at India Today:
For Salt and Saffron: A young writer paints a
Karachi with the passion a Rushdie reserves for
his Bombay Read
an excerpt from Kartography
She has been included in the Orange Futures, a
list of 21 women writers to look out for in the
21st century alongside Rachel Sieffert, author of
The Dark Room that won a Booker nomination
in 2001.
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Shauna Singh
Baldwin
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Shauna
Singh Baldwin is the writer of What the Body
Remembers, a novel set during Partition in
Lahore. |
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Githa Hariharan
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Gita Hariharan was born in 1954
and educated in Mumbai, Manila and the United
States. She is the writer of three novels, The
Thousand Faces of the Night (1982), which won
the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First
Book, The Ghosts of Vasu Master
(1994) and When Dream Travels (1999) and a
collection of stories titled The Art of Dying
(1993). She has also edited A Southern Harvest,
a volume of stories in in English translations
from four major South Indian Languages. She lives
in New Delhi where she works as a freelance
editor.
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Praises:
'Gita Hariharan's fiction is wonderful,
full of subtleties and humour and
tenderness.'
-Michael Ondaatje
'There is nothing loose about Hariharan's
writing. Her sentences are controlled,
all extra words shaved away. The
distilled brevity is delightful, the
unsaid hovers everywhere.'
- Business Standard
'An outstanding writer.'
-J. M. Coetzee
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