WRITER

Anita Desai

1937 - Today

Photo of Anita Desai

Icon of person Anita Desai

Anita Desai , born Anita Mazumdar (born 24 June 1937), is an Indian novelist and the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a writer she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. She received a Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Anita Desai has received more than 1,196,564 page views. Her biography is available in 35 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 34 in 2019). Anita Desai is the 5,552nd most popular writer (down from 5,123rd in 2019), the 710th most popular biography from India (down from 599th in 2019) and the 105th most popular Indian Writer.

Memorability Metrics

  • 1.2M

    Page Views (PV)

  • 45.83

    Historical Popularity Index (HPI)

  • 35

    Languages Editions (L)

  • 1.86

    Effective Languages (L*)

  • 5.15

    Coefficient of Variation (CV)

Notable Works

Baumgartner's Bombay
Fire on the mountain
In Custody
Clear light of day
Fiction
The classic novel by the author of Diamond Dust evokes the traumatic history of India after the departure of the British in a story of a Hindu family in Old Delhi and the complex relationships that develop among four people. Reprint.
Bye-bye blackbird
East Indians
Set against England's green and grisly landscape, enigmatic and attractive to some, depressing and nauseating to others, Bye-Bye Black Bird explores the lives of the outsiders seeking to forge a new identity in an alien society.
The village by the sea

Page views of Anita Desais by language

Over the past year Anita Desai has had the most page views in the with 145,183 views, followed by Hindi (7,608), and Italian (2,235). In terms of yearly growth of page views the top 3 wikpedia editions are Santali (319.85%), Finnish (73.33%), and Maithili (69.37%)

Among WRITERS

Among writers, Anita Desai ranks 5,552 out of 7,302Before her are Ferdinand von Schirach, Grace Paley, Joe Sacco, Melih Cevdet Anday, Larry McMurtry, and Michiel de Swaen. After her are Kerstin Gier, Atis Kronvalds, Roger Ascham, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Konstantin Vasilyevich Ivanov, and Johan Theorin.

Most Popular Writers in Wikipedia

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Contemporaries

Among people born in 1937, Anita Desai ranks 427Before her are Claude Allègre, Wilbur Ross, J. Bernlef, Umyar Mavlikhanov, Lothar Späth, and Allen Jones. After her are Irina Kirichenko, Fred Akuffo, Gennadi Gusarov, Emiliano Rodríguez, Klara Guseva, and Conny Vandenbos.

Others Born in 1937

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In India

Among people born in India, Anita Desai ranks 710 out of 1,861Before her are Paddy Ashdown (1941), Govinda (1963), Madhavrao I (1745), Dwarkanath Tagore (1794), Naveen Patnaik (1946), and Jasraj (1930). After her are Veerappan (1952), Ramdev (1965), Ravindra Prabhat (1969), Danny Denzongpa (1948), M. K. Stalin (1953), and Sunil Chhetri (1984).

Among WRITERS In India

Among writers born in India, Anita Desai ranks 105Before her are Cornelia Sorabji (1866), Ismat Chughtai (1915), Muthuswami Dikshitar (1775), Nalini Bala Devi (1898), Roshanara Begum (1617), and Shrilal Shukla (1925). After her are Ravindra Prabhat (1969), Javed Akhtar (1945), Nambi Narayanan (1941), Abdullah Yusuf Ali (1872), Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi (1907), and Ruskin Bond (1934).