In honour of Anita Desai's
being recognized as a Lifetime Fellow by Sahitya Akademi

we cordially invite you to a conversation between

Anita Desai

and

C.S. Lakshmi

Tuesday, December 4, 2007 at 7:00 pm

Venue: Crossword Book Store, Kemps Corner, Mumbai

To register, please call +91-22-6610-0888 or
e-mail: admin@asiasociety.org.in

One of India's foremost writers, Anita Desai has authored 16 works of fiction, with three of them—Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984) and Fasting, Feasting (1999)—being short listed for the Booker Prize. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London, the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, Girton College and Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge, and most recently the Sahitya Akademi in India, Anita Desai has been awarded The Alberto Moravia Prize for Literature and the Padma Shri. Her novel Fire on the Mountain (1977) won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize whilst her children's book The Village by the Sea (1982), won the Guardian Children's Fiction Award. Her most recent novel is The Zig Zag Way (2004), set in 20th-century Mexico. Anita Desai lives in the United States, where she is the John E. Burchard Professor of Writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.

A distinguished fiction writer in Tamil, C.S. Lakshmi's work is characterized by her passionate espousal of the cause of women, humor, a lucid and profound style, and a touch of realism. She is the only Tamil writer to have been included in the recently published Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, edited by Amit Chaudhuri. Most of her stories are about relationships and contain brilliant observations about contemporary life. A Doctorate from Jawaharlal Nehru University in the 1970's, she is presently the Director of Sound & Picture Archives for Research on Women (SPARROW) in Mumbai. She is a recipient of Narayanaswamy Aiyar Prize for her fiction.

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