Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Ruth Prawer born May 7, 1927 in Cologne, Germany, to Marcus (who was Polish-Jewish) and Eleanora Prawer (who was German Jewish ); Her father, Marcus, was a lawyer from Poland and her mother Eleanora’s father was cantor of Cologne’s biggest synagogue. The family fled the Nazis in 1939, emigrating to Britain. Her elder brother, Siegbert, is emeritus professor of German at the University of Oxford, an expert on Heine and horror films.
During the Second World War she lived in London and she began to speak English rather than German. She became a British citizen in 1948. She received her MA in English literature in 1951. She also married Cyrus H. Jhabvala , an Indian Parsi architect, in 1951.
The couple moved to New Delhi, India, in 1951 and they had three daughters: Ava, Firoza and Renana. Her three daughters are living all around the world: in India, in Los Angeles and in England. In 1975 Jhabvala moved to New York and divided her time between India and the United States.
While living in India during the 1950s, Jhabvala began to write novels about her new life there. 1955 she published her first book “To Whom She Will “. She also published narratives in which she represented the circumstances of the Indian society without primping as well as denouncing.
“Heat and Dust” was published in 1975 and won the Booker Prize, the most prestigious literary award for the English language in the Commonwealth, in the same year. The novel was picturised in 1983 by the filmmaker James Ivory with Julie Christie in the role of the narrator (in the movie named Anne).
I guess “Prawer” is pronounced “Praher” and “Jhabvala” like Chabwalla, the beginning has to come out of the fauces- that sounds stupid and it´s really difficult to write down how I think it is pronounced because I don´t know which letters I should choose…
(in collaboration with my good friend “wikipedia”)
