Immigrant of the Day: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Germany)

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (born May 7, 1927) is a prize-winning novelist, short story writer, and two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter. She is perhaps best known for her long collaboration with Merchant Ivory Productions, made up of director James Ivory and the late producer Ismail Merchant. Their films have won six Academy Awards.

Ruth Prawer was born in Cologne, Germany and her family fled the Nazis in 1939. During World War II, she lived in London and experienced the Blitz. She became a British citizen in 1948.

Prawer received her MA in English literature from Queen Mary College, University of London in 1951. She married Cyrus H. Jhabvala, an architect, in 1951 amd moved to New Delhi, India.

In 1975, Ruthe Prawer Jhabvala moved to New York and began to divide her time between India and the United States. In 1986, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

While living in India during the 1950s, Jhabvala began to write novels about her life there: To Whom She Will (1955), Nature of Passion (1956), Esmond in India (1957), The Householder (1960) and Get Ready for the Battle (1962). Many of her short stories appeared first in the New Yorker. In 1975, she won the Booker Prize, the most prestigious literary award for the English language in the Commonwealth, for her novel Heat and Dust.

In 1963, Jhabvala was approached by filmmakers James Ivory and Ismail Merchant to write a screenplay of her 1960 novel The Householder. The film, The Householder, was released by Merchant Ivory Productions in 1963 — this began a partnership that would produce over 20 films. The next Merchant-Ivory project Shakespeare Wallah (1965), was a critical success, and it was followed by a number of other collaborations between the three, including an adaptation of Jhabvala’s novel Heat and Dust, (1983); A Room with a View (1985), for which she won her first Oscar; Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990); Howards End (1992), her second Oscar win; and The Remains of the Day (1993), for which she was nominated for a third Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.  Jhabvala’s latest screenplay is The City of Your Final Destination (2008), based on the novel of the same name by Peter Cameron.

In 1984, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was honored with a MacArthur Foundation Award.

KJ