Author
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Birth Date
May 7, 1927
(85 Years)
Death Date
April 3, 2013
Associated Country
United Kingdom
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1927–2013) was a novelist, screenwriter, and two-time Academy Award winner, known for her sharp, observant portrayals of social life in India and later in Western settings. She was born in Cologne to a Jewish family and fled to England in 1939 to escape the rise of Nazism.
In 1951, she married an Indian architect and moved to India, where she lived for over two decades. This period deeply influenced her early fiction, including novels such as The Householder (1960) and Heat and Dust (1975), which won the Booker Prize.
Jhabvala later became a celebrated screenwriter, collaborating with director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant on films such as A Room with a View and Howards End, both of which won Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay. Her work is known for its wit, irony, and keen insight into cultural and social tensions.
In 1951, she married an Indian architect and moved to India, where she lived for over two decades. This period deeply influenced her early fiction, including novels such as The Householder (1960) and Heat and Dust (1975), which won the Booker Prize.
Jhabvala later became a celebrated screenwriter, collaborating with director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant on films such as A Room with a View and Howards End, both of which won Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay. Her work is known for its wit, irony, and keen insight into cultural and social tensions.
Books
Disinheritance 2026
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala began publishing fiction in 1956 and continued to do so until her death in 2013. Disinheritance showcases some of the finest of these efforts, all demonstrating Jhabvala’s powers...
Nobody has written so powerfully of the relationship between and within India and the Western middle classes than Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. In this selection of stories, chosen by her surviving family,...
Poet and Dancer 2019
Angel is dark and plain, introverted and submissive, a spontaneous composer of childish verses, wholly consumed by the wild, seductive spell of her cousin Lara - a beautiful, irresponsible creature...
Three Continents 2016
Three Continents is a tale of the clash between the easternized West and the westernized East. Twins Harriet and Michael–spoiled, quixotic, and extremely wealthy–have eschewed the vapid world of...
This observant and insightful novel reveals, in rich and poignant detail, the interior lives of three generations of people in their quest for love and beauty Louise, not content with her husband's...
Travelers 2016
In Travelers, Jhabvala examines the unlikely convergence of four wanderers: Asha, an imperious Indian widow, Raymond, a curious Englishman, Lee, an American looking for her spiritual core, and Gopi,...
East Into Upper East 2014
This brilliant collection spans two worlds - the restless, aspiring society of New York's Upper East Side and the world of India's capital city, New Delhi, where the old India symbolized by Gandhi's...
A Lovesong for India 2013
In this expansive story collection, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, author of Heat and Dust and the screenplays for The Remains of the Day and A Room with a View, continues her lifelong meditation on East and...
My Nine Lives 2005
For her first novel in more than nine years, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has written a most unusual book in a career of distinctive and unique accomplishments. My Nine Lives is "Chapters of a Possible Past,"...
The Householder 2001
This witty and perceptive novel is about Prem, a young teacher in New Delhi who has just become a householder and is finding his responsibilities perplexing.
Heat and Dust 1999
Partly set in colonial India during the 1920s, *Heat and Dust* tells the story of Olivia, a beautiful woman suffocated by the propriety and social constraints of her position as the wife of an...
Six colourful, comic characters inhabit A Backward Place. All but one are Westerners who have come to Delhi to experience an alternative way of life. But, far from being hippies, their ability to...