Theeyoor Chronicles

By N. Prabhakaran| Jayasree Kalathil

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About the book

‘A work of historic significance’ – BENYAMIN

A journalist goes to Theeyoor – ‘the land of fire’ – to investigate the unnaturally large number of suicides and disappearances in the city. After completing this project, however, Theeyoor refuses to leave his consciousness, and he decides to write its history.

This history is told through various documents: the writer’s notes, the anecdotes told to him while researching the suicides, Wardha Gopalan’s book The History of Theeyoor, information provided by a local newspaper agent, personal papers of individuals, as well as some ‘incidents’ that the journalist himself imagines.

In N. Prabhakaran’s masterful hands – and in Jayasree Kalathil’s brilliant translation – history, myth, facts, nature, political events, and everyday concerns of ordinary people weave together into a story that is at once local and universal.

Pages: 300

Available in: Paperback

Language: English

N. Prabhakaran

N. PRABHAKARAN is a major contemporary writer in Kerala and a pioneer of the post-modern aesthetic turn in Malayalam literature. He has published over forty works of novels, poetry, plays, short story collections, essays and a memoir. He is the recipient of several honours including the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award; the EMS Memorial Trust Award; the Vaikom Muhammed Basheer Memorial Trust Award; the Malayatoor Award; the Odakkuzhal Award; and the Muttathu Varky Literary Award for Contributions to Malayalam literature. Diary of a Malayali Madman, translated by Jayasree Kalathil, won the 2019 Crossword Book Award.

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Jayasree Kalathil

Jayasree Kalathil is the author of The Sackclothman, a children’s book that has been translated into Malayalam, Hindi and Telugu. She shared the JCB Prize for Literature in 2020 with S. Hareesh for her translation of his novel, Moustache. She is a recipient of the Crossword Book Award for Indian Language Translation and the V. Abdulla Memorial Translation Prize. Her translation of Sheela Tomy’s Valli (2022) was shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature, the American Literary Translators Association’s National Translation Award in Prose, and the Atta Galatta–Bangalore Literature Festival Book of the Year Award. Originally from Kottakkal in Malappuram district, Kerala, Jayasree currently lives in a small village in the New Forest in England.

N. Prabhakaran began writing at a time when Malayalam literature was in the grip of modernism. But, turning his back on its much-celebrated aesthetics, he wrote in clear and vibrant prose. Later, Malayalam literature would develop along these new paths cleared by Prabhakaran, and younger writers would look to him when they wanted to emulate writers from an older generation. It is because of this that Theeyoor Chronicles marks the timeless aesthetics of Malayalam literature. Published at the end of the last century, this novel is a brilliant amalgamation of local stories, myths, real history and imagined history. Jayasree Kalathil’s translation transforms it into a priceless contribution to English literature. - S. HAREESH

Fiction which reminds us that the deaths – and the lives – of others could so easily be our own, in a unique idiom that is a triumph of both the imagination and of translation. - ARUNAVA SINHA

A work of historic significance, as well as one that marked the beginning of an aesthetic evolution in Malayalam literature and brought local history into the novel. - BENYAMIN