Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1927–2013) was a British-American novelist and screenwriter whose fiction and films often examined cultural encounters between India and the West.

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Heat and Dust: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s 1975 novel interweaves the stories of two Englishwomen living in India across different eras. Its parallel journeys make cultural displacement and colonial inheritance central to her fiction.
James Ivory: An American film director and screenwriter whose films include many literary adaptations made with Ismail Merchant. He directed films from Jhabvala’s screenplays across decades of collaboration.
Cologne: A city in western Germany on the Rhine River. Jhabvala was born there in 1927 to a Polish-Jewish family.
Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay: An Academy Award recognizing a screenplay adapted from previously published or produced material. Jhabvala won it for A Room with a View and Howards End.
The Householder: A 1963 film directed by James Ivory, adapted from Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s novel of the same name. It began her long screenwriting partnership with Merchant Ivory.
Ismail Merchant: An Indian-born film producer who co-founded Merchant Ivory Productions with James Ivory. His producing partnership with Ivory gave Jhabvala’s adaptations a sustained film home.
World War II: A global war fought from 1939 to 1945 between the Allied and Axis powers. Her family fled Nazi Germany for Britain during the war.
Booker Prize: A British literary prize awarded annually for a novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom. She won the 1975 prize for Heat and Dust.
A Room with a View: A 1985 film adaptation of E. M. Forster’s novel, written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and directed by James Ivory. Her adaptation brought her cross-cultural sensibility to an English romantic comedy.
E. M. Forster: An English novelist whose works include A Passage to India and A Room with a View. Jhabvala adapted Forster twice, translating his social observation into screenplays.