Tanuja Desai Hidier: Biographical Note TANUJA DESAI HIDIER is American-born and currently based in the UK. Prior to moving, she lived in New York City, where she worked by day as a writer/editor for magazines, CD-Rom projects, and websites. Her first novel, Born Confused (Scholastic Press; October 2002) is a coming-of-age story with an Indian-American female protagonist, an aspiring photographer living in New Jersey, and is set both there and in New York City, largely in the context of the burgeoning South Asian club scene. The heart of Born Confused is about learning how to bring two cultures together
without falling apart yourself in the process. The book takes its title from the BC of ABCD, or American Born Confused Desi, a slightly derogatory term that first generation South Asians in the States and elsewhere use to describe these second generation Americans who are supposedly "confused" about their South Asian background. (Desi is Hindi for "from my country.") This theme of first and second generation India, and of finding your place in America, figures prominently in much of Desai Hidier's other work as well. Her Partition-era short story, "The Border", was awarded first prize in the fiction category in the London Writers/Waterstones Competition in October 2001. Also in the fall of 2001, her short story "Tiger, Tiger", which deals with the very real dangers that can result from exoticizing, and self-exoticizing, was included in the Big City Lit anthology (New York City) celebrating the last decade of Asian-American writing. | |
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