German-born novelist and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who won the Man Booker Prize in 1975 and received two Academy Awards for her Merchant Ivory adaptations of E.M. Forster, has died in her home in New York at the age of 85. Jhabvala (pronounced JOB-vahla) won the Booker for her novel Heat and Dust, about a family scandal in India, but she went on to even greater fame as the screenwriter for 22 films with the producer Ismail Merchant and the director James Ivory. She won Oscars for adapting Forster's A Room With a View (1986) and Howards End (1992), and her scripts were central to what would become the Merchant Ivory brand.
