Born and educated in India, Anita Desai is the author of many novels and short stories, and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times for her novels Clear Light of Day, In Custody and Fasting, Feasting. She is the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and the Royal Society of Literature.
I can’t wait for the new Anita Desai novel, Rosarita. She’s a writer I’ve loved since my adolescence, whose sharp observations and elegant sentences I admire increasingly as the years go on. Every new work from her is a gift. -- Kamila Shamsie, <i>Stylist </i>Summer Reads Her writing is sensuous, radical and uncannily perceptive * The Times * To compare Anita Desai's fiction with that of Chekhov or the short stories of Tolstoy is not extravagant; it is entirely warranted * Irish Times * Anita Desai is one of the most brilliant and subtle writers ever to have described the meeting of eastern and western culture -- Alison Lurie All her stories are full of a confidence in human nature that is a rarity and a pleasure to encounter * The Spectator * Desai has a wicked, subtle humour...and her characters are beautifully described... Her writing is polished and mature, with a wit she cleverly underplays * Daily Telegraph * One of the most gifted of contemporary Indian writers * New Yorker * Anita Desai writes exquisitely * Scotsman * She has the ability to shape and refine a piece of work of her own intense imagination into an independent work of art * The Times * A tantalising tale of memory, family and fantasy . . . evocative, subtle and enigmatic. Desai revels in equivocation and possibility, embracing the ambiguity of memory itself to tell a shimmering, sometimes fevered tale in which a mother and daughter are pulled apart and fused together * Financial Times *