Award-winning author Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, known for her short stories, novels and screenplays written over a literary career spanning almost six decades, died in New York last week after a prolonged illness.
Born in 1927 in Cologne in Germany to Jewish parents, Jhabvala immigrated to Britain in 1939 with her family, fleeing the Nazi regime. It was in London that she met her husband, Cyril Jhabvala, an Indian Parsi architect with whom she moved to India in 1951. Her first novel, To Whom She Will, was published in 1955. She won the Booker prize in 1975 for her novel Heat and Dust which was later adapted as a movie.
