Founded in 1993 by Thomas Lux and Jane Cooper, the Summer Seminar is a chance for writers to experience the Sarah Lawrence pedagogy, to work with a faculty of acclaimed writers and passionate teachers, and to spend a week in a stimulating atmosphere, where writing—and thinking about writing—is at the core.
![Anita Desai]()
Novelist, short-story writer, and children's author Anita Desai was born in 1937 in Mussoorie, India. She was educated at Delhi University. Her novels include Fire on the Mountain (1977), which won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984) and Fasting, Feasting (1999), each of which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In Custody was made into a film by Merchant Ivory productions. Her children's book, The Village by the Sea (1982), won the Guardian Children's Fiction Award.
![Kiran Desai]()
Kiran Desai was born in India in 1971 and grew up there before moving to England, aged fourteen years. She was educated in India, England, and the US. Her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998) won a 1998 Betty Trask Award, and her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss (2006), set in the mid 1980s in a Himalayan village, won the 2006 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (USA).