A Birthday in London

The novelist and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born in Cologne, where her father, a Polish Jewish immigrant, was an attorney; her maternal grandfather was the cantor of the largest synagogue in Cologne. The family fled Germany in 1939, settling in London. In 1951, she married Cyrus Jhabvala, an Indian architect, and moved to Delhi. The lives of women in newly independent, postcolonial India were the basis for much of her fiction, including her first novel, Amrita (1956). After the 1963 adaptation of her novel The Householder, she wrote many more screenplays based on British and American literary classics for Merchant Ivory Productions. During their four decades of collaboration, Jhabvala continued to write fiction, publishing fourteen novels. She was awarded two Academy Awards, for the screenplays of A Room with a View (1985) and Howards End (1992), as well as a Man Booker Prize for the novel Heat and Dust (1975).