Biography
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was a novelist and screenwriter. Born in Cologne in 1927, she moved to England in 1939 and became a British citizen in 1948. After marrying Indian architect Cyrus Jhabvala in 1951, she lived in New Delhi until 1975, when she relocated to New York; she became a US citizen in 1986.
She wrote a dozen novels and several short story collections, many drawing on her experiences in India. Her novel Heat and Dust (1975) won the Booker Prize. From the 1960s she collaborated extensively with Merchant Ivory Productions, writing more than twenty screenplays, including adaptations of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1986) and Howards End (1992), both of which won Academy Awards for best adapted screenplay. She also wrote the screenplay for The Remains of the Day (1993). She was appointed CBE in 1998 and died in New York in 2013.
