Biography
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was a novelist and screenwriter. Born in Cologne, Germany, in 1927, she moved with her family to England in 1939 and later became a British and American citizen. She married Indian architect Cyrus Jhabvala in 1951 and lived in New Delhi until the mid-1970s, after which she divided her time between India and New York.
She began writing screenplays in the early 1960s after meeting producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory in Delhi. Their collaboration, which lasted nearly five decades, produced more than twenty films, many of them adaptations of literary works. Jhabvala wrote the screenplays for Merchant Ivory productions including A Room with a View (1986), Howards End (1992) and The Remains of the Day (1993).
She also wrote twelve novels and several collections of short stories. Her novel Heat and Dust (1975) won the Booker Prize. She received Academy Awards for best adapted screenplay for A Room with a View and Howards End, and was appointed CBE in 1998.
