Anita Desai

Anita Desai is a literary fiction award-winning Indian novelist and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Born in 1937, she is the daughter of a Bengali businessman, D.N. Mazumdar, and a German immigrant mother, Toni Nime. Her father met her immigrant mother while studying engineering in prewar Berlin. The two married when it was unusual for an Indian man to marry a European woman. After marriage, the parents migrated to New Delhi.