Born in Cologne, Germany, on May 7, 1927, to Polish Jewish parents, Ruth Prawer fled Nazi Germany to England with her family in 1939. Educated near London, she attended Queen Mary College, London University, from 1945╨1951, receiving an M.A. in English literature in 1951. In 1951 she married Cyrus Jhabvala, an architect, and moved with him to India, where she had three daughters and began to write.
Her early fiction was set in India; her position as an expatriate allowed her to write with the viewpoint of both an insider and an outsider. Her novel, Heat and Dust, which won the Booker Prize in 1975, explored Indian themes while working with new narrative techniques and experimental forms. Although she went on to write more than ten novels and several collections of short stories, she became best known for her work as a screenwriter.
In 1961, filmmakers James Ivory and Ismail Merchant approached her about creating a film of her fourth novel, The Householder, the story of an arranged marriage between a schoolmaster and a young woman. She agreed, beginning one of the longest creative collaborations in the history of the cinema. Three decades later she had written sixteen screenplays for Merchant and Ivory, including adaptations of two of her own novels. Her screenplays of E.M. Forster╒s A Room with a View, 1986, and Howard╒s End, 1992, both earned Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay.
She was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1976 and a MacArthur fellowship in 1984. She took up permanent residence in New York City in 1975 and became an American citizen in 1986. Her subsequent literary interests moved away from Indian subjects and settings in favor of American ones. In Search of Love and Beauty, 1983, Three Continents, 1987, and Poet and Dancer, 1993, are all set in Manhattan.
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