Ki Rajanarayanan

Ki Rajanarayanan (1922-2021) was born in a village Idaiseval, near Kovilpatti, in southern Tamil Nadu. This belongs to the “Karisal” or black soil region in the Tamil land. The flavour of the language and life in this region is fresh in this novel, not surprisingly, as Ki Ra is acknowledged to be a doyen of Karisal literature. He won the Sahitya Akademi award for this novel in 1991.
His first short story was published in 1958. Since, he published numerous short stories, three novels and several essays. He has compiled a dictionary of dialect of the Black Soil region (Karisal vattaara vazhakku sol agaradhi). For all this, he did not attend school after the seventh class. He moved to Puducherry in 1989. This followed his being appointed as an honorary professor of folklore in the Tamil Department of Pondicherry Central University