Shashi Deshpande is an award-winning Indian women novelist and short story writer. She is one of the writers with little pretentiousness. Her novels generally have women as the protagonists. This has led booklovers to describe her as a feminist writer.
Early Life of Shashi Deshpande
Shashi Deshpande was born in the year of 1938 in Karnataka. Her father Shriranga was an eminent Kannada dramatist and writer. She received her early education at a protestant mission school in Karnataka. Since childhood, she was fond of English literature and used to read various types of English books. Particularly she liked the works of Jane Austen. Later, she studied Economics in Mumbai and graduated in Law from Bengaluru. In Mumbai, she studied journalism at the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan.
Career of Shashi Deshpande
In 1978, Shashi Deshpande"s first anthology of short stories was published. Two years after, in 1980, her first novel "The Dark Holds No Terror" was published. In 1996, her famous novel "A Matter of Time" was published where she unfolds the different experiences of women in India. She has written four children"s books, a number of short stories, and nine novels, moreover several discerning essays.
Her novels are mainly based on women lives and their problems, particularly in Indian context. She raised her voice against suffering of women and also created a mass awareness in this matter through her writings. Her books are being translated into several Indian languages.
Bibliography of Shashi Deshpande
Shashi Deshpande has written several articles on different subjects like literature, language, feminism which have been put collectively in an anthology "Writing from the Margin". Her writings are as follows:
•The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980)
•If I Die Today (1982)
•Come Up and Be Dead (1983)
•Roots and Shadows (1983)
•That Long Silence (1989)
•The Intrusion and Other Stories (1993)
•A Matter of Time (1996)
•Small Remedies (2000)
•The Binding Vine (2002)
•Moving On (2004)
•In the Country of Deceit (2008)
•Shadow Play (2013)
•A Summer Adventure
•The Hidden Treasure
•The Only Witness
•The Narayanpur Incident
Awards of Shashi Deshpande
Shashi Deshpande won the Sahitya Akademi Award for the novel "That Long Silence" in 1990 and the Padma Shri award in 2009. Her novel "Shadow Play" was shortlisted for The Hindu Literary Prize in 2014. She resigned from her position on the Sahitya Akademi"s general counsel and returned her Sahitya Akademi award on October 9, 2015 as an action against extremism.
