Farewell, Mahatma : Stories

Devibharathi (b. 1957) was born and raised in a small village in western Tamil Nadu, the second of five children in a schoolmaster’s family. He has worked as a political activist, government employee, journalist, managing editor of a leading literary magazine, and scriptwriter for television programmes. During a writing career spanning more than forty years, Devibharathi has published two collections of short stories, two novellas, four novels, a play, and two non-fiction anthologies containing essays and memoirs. Farewell, Mahatma, a collection of short stories in English translation, was published in 2014. Nizhalin Thanimai, the original of The Solitude of a Shadow, is his first novel. His fiction has received wide attention and praise from Tamil readers and critics. He has received several awards, including the inaugural Tannaram Literary Award in 2021, and the Kalaignar Porkizhi and Sahitya Akademi awards in 2023. He lives and works in a village in Tamil Nadu’s Tiruppur district.

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N. Kalyan Raman is a translator of contemporary Tamil fiction and poetry into English. Over the past twenty-five years, he has published fourteen works of Tamil fiction in translation, by important writers such as Ashokamitran, Poomani, Devibharathi, Perumal Murugan, Vaasanthi and Salma. His translations of contemporary Tamil poets have been published widely in journals and anthologies in India and abroad. Kalyan Raman also writes on cinema, politics and literature for leading journals and magazines in India. His translation of Perumal Murugan’s Poonachi was shortlisted for the inaugural JCB Prize (2018), longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature (2020) in the US, and was awarded Sahitya Akademi’s Translation Prize – English (2022). In 2017, he received the prestigious Pudumaipithan Award for his contribution to the cause of Tamil literature through his translations. He lives and works in Chennai.