BARUCH COLLEGE, NEW YORK, NY (3/10/03)—Anita Desai, the Spring 2003 Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence, will be reading selections from her works on Tuesday, March 18 at 5:45 PM in the Newman Conference Center, located on the seventh floor of 151 East 25th Street. The event is free and open to the general public.

Desai, who is teaching a workshop on fiction writing as part of her tenure as a Visiting Professor, was raised in Delhi by German and Bengali parents. She is the prize-winning author of Cry, The Peacock; Voices in the City; Bye-Bye Blackbird; Baumgartner’s Bombay and other highly regarded novels.

A groundbreaking female novelist in the country of her birth, Desai’s work has been praised for her depiction of the interior lives of women. “I don’t have an agenda as a writer. People think that because I write about India I must be trying to portray India in a certain way. But really when you write, you don’t think about your readers at all. You don’t imagine what your readers will look for or what they expect from a book,” she said in a 2001 interview with the Spanish magazine Lateral.

She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in England and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Desai attended the University of Delhi, and speaks English, German and Hindi fluently. For more information on this event and on the Writer-in-Residence program, call the English department at 646-312-3910.

Olayinka Fadahunsi
Office of Communications and Marketing