R.I.P. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

[Big Magilla]

The writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who has died aged 85, achieved her greatest fame late in life, and for work she had once dismissed as a hobby – listing "writing film scripts" as a recreation in Who's Who. Her original screenplays and adaptations of literary classics for the film producer Ismail Merchant and the director James Ivory were met with box-office and critical success. The trio met in 1961, and almost immediately became collaborators, as well as close and lifelong friends.

Soon after Merchant and Ivory themselves met (in New York), Merchant proposed that they make a film of Jhabvala's early novel The Householder (1960). The pair then went to Delhi and asked her to sell them the book and write a screenplay of it in eight days flat. Over the next five decades, she wrote 23 screenplays. The collaborations included adaptations of EM Forster's A Room with a View (1985) and Howards End (1992), for both of which Jhabvala won Academy Awards; and Henry James's The Bostonians (1984) and Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1993). Jhabvala's two Oscars put her in the incongruous company of Bette Davis and Elizabeth Taylor – journalists reported how odd the gilt statuettes looked in her plain New York flat.

She did not care. Her own fiction was what mattered to her, whether or not it did to anyone else. This was how it had been since she began writing novels in India in the 1950s, feeling: "I was at the bottom of a deep abyss. No one read them. But I enjoyed it." The films were fun, but: "I live so much more in and for the books," she wrote to a friend.

She was a brilliant storyteller. Her work darkened towards the end of her life: she wrote of deception and self-deception and of time's revenges, the twists and turns of an implacable fate that her worst charlatans could manipulate to their advantage. Her vision was bleak; her tone austere. But her supply of complex characters and subtle, vivid scenes was inexhaustible and she caught the ambiguities of human behaviour and the pleasures of the senses in precise, perfect words.

Her dozen novels and eight collections of short stories (and other stories published in the New Yorker and elsewhere) won Jhabvala the admiration of the sternest critics of her time. Raymond Mortimer thought she beat all other western novelists in her understanding of modern India. To CP Snow, no other living writer better afforded readers that "definition of the highest art", the feeling "that life is this and not otherwise". Her literary awards included the 1975 Booker prize for her eighth novel, Heat and Dust. Merchant Ivory's 1983 film of it marked their breakthrough from art-house exclusivity to popular success.

Jhabvala spoke with an unclassifiable accent in an idiosyncratic drawl. The wit, economy and detachment that she achieved in her fiction also played in her personality, and there, too, they masked contradictory qualities. Her characters surge with violent emotions (which they often suppress) and pursue voracious appetites (for food, sex, love) with a relish their creator seems to share. Her second novel was entitled The Nature of Passion (1956); there was a passion at her own core, too, though it was hard to tell for what.

For writing, certainly. "The only three hours in the day I'm really alive," she said of her unfailing morning's work. She continued to write and publish until the end: a new short story of hers appeared in the New Yorker last month. She did not choose to become a writer, she said: "One is just born that way." When she began school and wrote her first composition, she was "flooded with my destiny", and – as the words poured – with delight. It was 1933; she was six.

She had been born in Cologne into a patriotic German family of assimilated Jews. Her maternal grandfather was the cantor in Cologne's biggest synagogue.

One day in 1934 they sat on their balcony overlooking Cologne's main avenue and watched the Nazis parade pass. That night, Ruth's parents were arrested, then released. Her father, Marcus, a solicitor of Polish parentage, could not get her mother, Eleonora (nee Cohn), to leave Germany until April 1939. Then, they came to Britain with their son, Siegbert, who later became professor of German at Oxford, and Ruth. All Marcus's family – more than 40 people – perished during the Holocaust. In 1948, when he discovered how they had been killed, he took his own life.

Jhabvala never wrote of her early life. She never spoke of it in public, until 1979, when she received the Nell Gunn international fellowship and gave a public lecture in Edinburgh. Her chosen subject was disinheritance. Great writing such as Gunn's, she said, seems to come from the writer's "ground of being", an inheritance rooted in "tradition, landscape and that inexplicable region where childhood and ancestral memories merge". She herself had "only disinheritance" of this. "I stand before you as a writer without any ground of being out of which to write: really blown about from country to country, culture to culture till I feel – till I am – nothing." She spoke without self-pity: "As it happens, I like it that way."

The refugee found her home in the limitless world of literature. She wrote "furiously" through her childhood; within days of arriving in Britain, she was writing in English, and graduated in English literature from Queen Mary College, London University. Asked later if she had happy memories of England, she said: "If it weren't for England, I wouldn't have any memories at all."

In 1951, she married Cyrus Jhabvala ("Jhab"), a Parsee architect whom she had met in London, and went to live with him in Delhi. She plunged in "total immersion" into India – the jasmine, the starlit nights, the temple bells, the holy men, the heat. She bore three daughters, wore the sari and wrote of India and the Indians as if she were Indian herself. But her passionate love for India changed into its opposite. By 1975, she found she could no longer write of it nor in it.

"There need never be a dull moment," she admitted in a rare autobiographical piece describing her difficult feelings about India by the time she left it. "Yet all my moments are dull. It is my own fault, I know." In this place where her beloved family flourished – "my husband is Indian and so are my children" – her complicated makeup asserted itself with increasing intensity. "I am a central European with an English education and a deplorable tendency to constant self-analysis. I am irritable and have weak nerves," she admitted in her introduction to her story collection How I Became a Holy Mother (1976).

She went to the US. By then she had collaborated with Merchant and Ivory on several films with Indian subjects including Shakespeare Wallah (1963) and Autobiography of a Princess (1975), her favourite. But now her attention, her fiction and their joint projects returned to the west, and she took an apartment in New York in the block where Merchant and Ivory lived.

So she changed continents three times in her life – and entitled her 10th novel Three Continents in 1987. It amused her to liken this to sexual infidelity. "Perhaps I'm just fickle by nature and get tired of countries the way other women do of husbands or lovers." In New York she found a sense of homecoming. Here were the overheated high-ceilinged, furniture-stuffed apartments of her European childhood, with corner delis selling the same pickled cucumbers and potato salads she had loved then.

In the latter part of her life, her daughters' marriages (to Indian, American and English husbands) meant that they, too, settled in three different continents, while Ruth and Jhab established a modus vivendi of dividing their time between two. In one of her last collections, East into Upper East (1998), her stories travelled between India and Manhattan, as she and Jhab did in these years. They were among the best she ever wrote. In the year of its publication, she was appointed CBE.

Her husband and daughters – Renana, Ava and Firoza-Bibi (known as Poji) – survive her. Her brother died last year. Shortly before her own death, she accepted a visit from a rabbi. After performing a blessing, he asked her for the best thing she could recall in her life. "Without any hesitation," Ava wrote afterwards, "she pointed to papa."

• Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, novelist and screenwriter, born 7 May 1927; died 3 April 2013