Karthika Nair

Karthika Nair is the author of several books, Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, which won the 2015 Tata Literature Live! Award for Book of the Year (Fiction), and was highly commended at the 2016 Forward Prizes (UK). She has helmed the scripts of several dance productions, such as the multiple-award-winning DESH (2011), Akram Khan’s dance solo.

She has written two books: Until the Lions and Bearings.

Praise for books by Karthika Nair:

“Until the Lions by Karthika Naïr is an exceptional book…The women characters of this epic – from Hidimba to Uttara and many shadowy presences in between – come alive in compelling dramatic monologues that segue between diverse poetic forms, swivelling dramatically from cameo to centre-stage. The result is not a series of grand rhetorical flourishes. Instead, these monologues make room for the overlooked, the marginal, the quirky, combining direct and oblique interrogations of the status quo with a tender wealth of detail.” – Arundhathi Subramaniam, Biblio: Reviewers’ Choice 2015 (December 2015)

“… a beautiful, difficult, discomfiting and physically stirring book of intricately connected dramatic monologues performed by marginal characters from the Mahabharata who are mostly female.” – Aveek Sen, Biblio: Reviewers’ Choice 2015 (December 2015)

“They’re all great books, but Until the Lions was a revelation about the kind of power that can be held within lines of words… The lines of Amba, for instance, are so intense it felt like they were faintly vibrating before my eye.” – Raghu Karnad, Deccan Herald: Favourite Reads of 2015 (December 2015)

“It is fabulous and that’s the reason this book can’t be reviewed properly. You need to read it.” – Bibek Debroy, OPEN Magazine (October 2015)

“But in all truthfulness, it’s unfair to quote anything from Naïr’s book, just as it is unfair to cut out separate segments from a painting and present those as an example of an artist’s talent. Naïr’s words have to be read in their right context, not least because of her emphasis on, and experiments with, myriad poetic forms in this book: forms like the canzone, the landay, the Spanish glosa and concrete poetry among others. In Until The Lions, the words are actually seen dancing on the page.” – Vineet Gill, Business Line (December 2015)