About Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Life

Ruth Prawer was born May 7, 1927 in Cologne. She was born to Marcus (Polnish-Jewish), a lawyer, and Eleanora Prawer (German-Jewish) and fled the Nazis in 1939 together with her parents and her brother to Great Britain. Soon she spoke English better than German and so she acquired British citizenship in 1948. Three years later she received her MA in English literature, married the Indian Cyrus H. Jhabvala and moved to New Delhi with him. The couple has three daughters. In 1975 Prawer Jhabvala moved to New York and commuted between the US and India. Eleven years later she acquired naturalized citizenship in the US.

 

About her literary process

Most of Prawer Jhabvala’s stories deal with the topic India. She began to write when she arrived in New Delhi and so she incorporates her experiences of her new life. Furthermore, she was in India because of her husband and so she was interested in herself in India and not in the country itself. Her personal experiences and thus the storys are written from the point of view of a nonnative. These characteristics are also shown in Heat and Dust. For this novel she won the Booker Prize in 1975.

 

Screenplays

In 1963 Prawer Jhabvala began to write screenplays because she was asked by Merchant Ivory Productions to write a screenplay to her own book The Householder. Thenceforward she wrote numerous screenplays thereunder for her own novel Heat and Dust. She won an Oscar for her screenplay for A Room with a View (1983), another for Howards End (1992) and was nominated for a third Oscar for The Remains of a Day in 1993 but did not win.

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