Anita Desai is an Indian novelist and the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London. She was born as Anita Mazumdar in 1937 and began her literary career in 1963 with the novel Cry, the Peacock. Her other notable works include Voices in the City (1963), Fire on the Mountain (1977), and an anthology of short stories, Games at Twilight (1978).

Her novel The Village by the Sea won the Guardian Prize in 1983. Desai's works often explore themes such as familial tensions and the alienation of Indian women from middle class backgrounds. Her more recent novels have addressed other topics, including antisemitism in Germany and the erosion of traditional customs.

Desai has received high praise from fellow authors like Salman Rushdie. Her works have been translated into eleven languages, and three of her novels—Clear Light of Day, In Custody, and Fasting, Feasting—were all finalists for the prestigious Booker Prize in 1980, 1984, and 1999, respectively. In Custody was adapted into a film in 1993 by James Ivory and Ismail Merchant, with the screenplay written by Desai herself.