Along with the Sun : Stories from Tamil Nadu's Black Soil Region

Ki. Rajanarayanan (b. 1922) was an acclaimed writer and folklorist. He started writing in the late 1950s. With his firm conviction that the spoken language was the correct language to use while writing, he was a pioneer in the introduction of dialect in his works. He has over thirty books to his credit, the most recent being the novel Andarandap Pakshi (The Andaranda Bird). In 1991, he was honoured with the Sahitya Akademi Award for Gopalapurathu Makkal (The People of Gopalapuram), a novel about a community of Telugu-speaking people who had migrated to Tamil Nadu. He was also the recipient of the Ilakkiya Chinthanai Award in 1979, as well as a Literary Achievement Special Award from the Toronto-based Tamil Literary Garden in 2016. From 1998 to 2002, he was a member of the General Council and Advisory Board of the Sahitya Akademi. As a member of the Communist Party of India, he was twice imprisoned in the late 1940s and early 1950s, for his support for and participation in peasant rebellions. To mark his sixtieth birthday celebrations in 1982, he embarked on the publication of this anthology, Karisal Kadaikal. He passed away in 2021.

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Padma Narayanan (b. 1935) is a short-story writer and the translator of numerous works of literary fiction from Tamil to English, including a collection of stories by the noted writer Imayam (forthcoming), Aadhavan’s I, Ramaseshan (2008), La. Sa. Ramamritham’s Apeetha (2014), Indira Parthasarathy’s Poison Roots (2014), Ramamritham’s The Stone Laughs and Atonement (2005), and two collections of short stories by Appadurai Muttulingam (2009 and 2017). Her work has appeared in Agni (Boston), Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. Her translation of Dilip Kumar’s ‘The Story of a Clerk’, published in Caravan in 2012, inspired a celebrated movie adaptation, Nasir (2020). She has also translated several books from English into Tamil, and has written and spoken on the subject of translation. She lives in New Delhi.“