Ruth Prawer was born in Cologne in 1927. Her parents were German Jews, and the family moved to London in 1939. Ruth met an Indian architect (Cyrus S. H. Jhabvala) at university in London, and in 1951 she followed him to Delhi where they married. Heat and Dust is said to have been written in a wave of revulsion for everything Indian. In 1976 she moved to New York, following a severe asthma attack brought on by the pollution in Delhi. Her husband only joined her a decade later. She became close friends with Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, writing screenplays for many of their films; she won Oscars for A Room with a View (1986) and Howard's End (1992).
© Haydn Thompson 2021