Anita Mazumdar Desai (born June 24, 1937) is an Indian novelist and Emeritus John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been shortlisted for the Booker prize three times. Her daughter, the author Kiran Desai, won the 2006 Booker prize.
Selected works
Anita Mazumdar Desai November 15, 2009
Amitav Ghosh November 15, 2009
Amitav Ghosh (born 1956), is an Indian-Bengali author known for his work in the English language. Ghosh’s latest work of fiction is Sea of Poppies (2008) an epic saga, set just before the Opium Wars which encapsulates the colonial history of the East. His other novels are The Circle of Reason (1986), The Shadow Lines (1990), The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), The Glass Palace (2000) and The Hungry Tide (2004). The Shadow Lines won the Sahitya Akademi Award, India’s most prestigious literary award.[2] TheCalcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for 1997.[3] Sea of Poppies was shortlisted for the 2008 Booker Prize[4]. Ghosh’s fiction is characterised by strong themes that may be somewhat identified withpostcolonialism but could be labelled as historical novels. His topics are unique and personal; some of his appeal lies in his ability to weave “Indo-nostalgic” elements into more serious themes. Ghosh has also written In an Antique Land (1992), Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma (1998), Countdown (1999), and The Imam and the Indian (2002, a large collection of essays on different themes such asfundamentalism, history of the novel, Egyptian culture, and literature). In 2007, he was awarded the Padma Shri by the Indian government.
Animal’s People November 10, 2009
Animal’s People is a novel by Indra Sinha. It was shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize and is the Winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’s Prize:Best Book From Europe & South Asia. Sinha’s narrator is a 19-year-old orphan of Khaufpur, born a few days before the 1984 Bhopal disaster, whose spine has become so twisted that he must walk on all fours. Ever since he can remember, he has gone on all fours. Known to every-one simply as Animal, he rejects sympathy, spouts profanity and obsesses about sex. He lives with a crazy old French nun called Ma Franci, and his dog Jara. Also, he falls in love with a local musician’s daughter, Nisha. “I used to be human once. So I’m told. I don’t remember it myself, but people who knew me when I was small say I walked on two feet just like a human being…” The story was recorded in Hindi on a series of tapes by Animal himself and it has been translated to English as well. The author uses Animal’s odd mixture of Hindi, French and Indianised English such as “kampani”(company),”jarnalis”(journalist) and “jamisbonding”(spying, like James Bond.
