She considers Clear Light of Day (1980) 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. The 1999 Booker Prize finalist novel Fasting, Feasting increased her popularity. Her novel The Zigzag Way, set in 20th-century Mexico, appeared in 2004 and her latest collection of short stories, The Artist of Disappearance, was published in 2011. 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 (to which she dedicated Baumgartner's Bombay). Film In 1993, her novel In Custody was adapted by Merchant Ivory Productions into an English film by the same name, directed by Ismail Merchant, with a screenplay by Shahrukh Husain. It won the 1994 President of India Gold Medal for Best Picture and stars Shashi Kapoor, Shabana Azmi and Om Puri. Awards 1978 – Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize – Fire on the Mountain 1978 – Sahitya Akademi Award (National Academy of Letters Award) – Fire on the Mountain 1980 – Shortlisted, Booker Prize for Fiction – Clear Light of Day 1983 – Guardian Children's Fiction Prize – The Village by the Sea: an Indian family story 1984 – Shortlisted, Booker Prize for Fiction – In Custody 1993 – Neil Gunn Prize 1999 – Shortlisted, Booker Prize for Fiction: Fasting, Feasting 2000 – Alberto Moravia Prize for Literature (Italy) 2003 – Benson Medal of Royal Society of Literature 2007 – Sahitya Akademi Fellowship 2014 – Padma Bhushan Selected works Cry, The Peacock (1963) Orient Paperbacks Voices in the City (1965), Orient Paperbacks Bye-bye Blackbird (1971), Orient Paperbacks The Peacock Garden (1974), Mammoth Books Where Shall We Go This Summer? (1975), Orient Paperbacks Cat on a Houseboat (1976), Orient Longman Fire on the Mountain (1977), Random House India Games at Twilight (1978), Vintage Publishing Clear Light of Day (1980), Random House India The Village by the Sea (1982), Penguin India In Custody (1984) Baumgartner's Bombay (1988) Journey to Ithaca (1995), Random House India Scholar and Gipsey (1996), Weidenfeld & Nicolson Fasting, Feasting (1999), Random House India