Many Countries, Many Stories : Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

To be true, I have never heard about her before. But after reading an eulogy about her in The Hindu, I was curious to know about her. I googled and found her to be a German-born British and American Booker prize-winning novelist, short story writer and two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter, married to Cyrus S. H. Jhabvala, an Indian Parsi architect. 

 She resided in Delhi, India for twenty-four years.

And in 1975, she moved to New York keeping her Alipur road flat and visiting it in the cruel winters of New York.

She is Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. She left us at 86 on 3 April 2013.

She had seen the unleashing of heinous crimes against the Jews and her family was one of the last groups of refugees to flee the Nazi regime, immigrating to Britain in 1939. She began to start speaking English rather than German during the second war years that she experienced in Britain.

She became a British citizen in 1948. And the following year her father committed suicide after discovering that forty of his relatives have died in the Holocaust.       

 In 1986, she became a naturalised citizen of the United States.

To know more about her work you can visit the New Yorker archives online and get a taste of her writings.