Indian · 1938–2024
Shashi Deshpande was born in Dharwad, Karnataka, the daughter of the Kannada playwright and Sanskrit scholar Adya Rangacharya, and took degrees in economics and law before starting to write in her thirties. She published eleven novels, several story collections, and children's books, almost all of them set inside middle-class Indian households and narrated by educated women who have done everything correctly and find themselves silenced anyway. Her subject is the marriage that works on paper. She refused the label of feminist novelist for years and then accepted it on her own terms, arguing that Indian women's fiction was being read for sociology rather than craft. She won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1990 for That Long Silence and the Padma Shri in 2009, and returned her Sahitya Akademi fellowship in 2015 in protest at the academy's silence over the murder of the writer M.M. Kalburgi.