6 Exceptional Indian Women Writers

Anita Desai
One of India’s most prolific novelists, Anita Desai is a veteran in the writing field. She has been short listed three times for the Booker Prize, for her books: Clear Light of Day, In Custody and Fasting, Feasting in 1980, 1984 and 1999 respectively. For her idyllic prose novel ‘The Village by the Sea,’ Desai won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize in 1983. She was honored with a Sahitya Akademi Award for her novel ‘Fire on the Mountain’ in 1978. Along with being a novelist, Desai is also the Emeritus John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Institute of Technology at Massachusetts. One of her popular quotes on writing is, “Someone who wants to write should make an effort to write a little something every day. Writing in this sense is the same as athletes who practice a sport every day to keep their skills honed.”
Anita Desai is one of the first Indian women who took up writing as a serious business and since her first novel ‘Cry The Peacock’ in 1963, she has produced works which has put her on the A-list of writers. Her latest work is ‘The Artist Disappearance’ published in 2011.

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