Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is the only person to have won both a Booker Prize and an Oscar. She wrote a dozen novels, 23 screenplays, and eight collections of short stories. She was made a CBE in 1998 and granted a joint fellowship by BAFTA in 2002.

About Ruth Prawer Jhabvala in brief

Summary Ruth Prawer JhabvalaRuth Prawer Jhabvala was a German-born British and American Booker prize-winning novelist, short story writer and two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter. She is the only person to have won both a Booker Prize and an Oscar. She wrote a dozen novels, 23 screenplays, and eight collections of short stories. She was made a CBE in 1998 and granted a joint fellowship by BAFTA in 2002 with director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant. Her early works in India dwell on the themes of romantic love and arranged marriages and are portraits of the social mores, idealism and chaos of the early decades of independent India. She moved to New York in 1975 and lived there until her death in 2013, becoming a naturalised citizen of the United States in 1986. Many of her works portray the lives of immigrants from post-Nazi Europe and post-World War II Europe. Her works feature India as a setting where her characters go in search of spiritual enlightenment only to emerge defrauded and exposed to the materialistic pursuits of the East.

In 2005 she published Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past with illustrations by her husband and the book was described as “her most autobiographical fiction to date” Her first novel, To Whom She Will, was published in 1955. It was followed by Esmond in India, The Householder and Get Ready for Battle. The Householders, with a screenplay by Jhab vala, was filmed in 1963 by Merchant and Ivory. In 1984, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for her book Out of India. The New York Times Review of Books chose her Out Of India as one of the best reads for that year of that year. She died in 2013 and was buried in New York, where she lived with her husband Cyrus, a Parsi-Parsi architect. She had three daughters, one of whom was born in New Delhi and the other two were born in London.