Born 24 June 1937,was a German.She grew up speaking German at home and Bengali, Urdu, Hindi and English outside the house. She first learned to read and write in English at school and as a result it became her "literary language.She was a student at Queen Mary's Higher Secondary School in Delhi and received her B.A. in English literature in 1957 from the Miranda House of the University of Delhi.Desai published her first novel, Cry The Peacock, in 1963. She considers Clear Light Of Day her most autobiographical work as it is set during her coming of age and also in the same neighborhood in which she grew up. In 1984 she published In Custody - about an Urdu poet in his declining days - which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 1993 she became a creative writing teacher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her latest novel, The Zigzag Way, is set in 20th-century Mexico.
Desai has taught at Mount Holyoke College, Baruch College and Smith College. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and of Girton College, Cambridge University. In addition, she writes for the New York Review of Books.
She has been given following awards:
Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize- Fire on the Mountain
Sahitya Akademi Award Fire on the Mountain
Shortlisted, Booker Prize for Fiction - Clear Light of Day
Guardian Children's Fiction Prize - The Village By The Sea
Shortlisted, Booker Prize for Fiction - In Custody
Neil Gunn Prize
Alberto Moravia Prize for Literature
Benson Medal of Royal Society of Literature

Her Writings are:
The Zigzag Way
Diamond Dust and Other Stories
Fasting, Feasting
Journey to Ithaca
Baumgartner's Bombay
In Custody
The Village By The Sea
Clear Light of Day
Games at Twilight
Fire on the Mountain
Where Shall We Go This Summer?
Bye-bye Blackbird
Cry, The Peacock