Jeyakanthan

Jeyakanthan's Selected Short Stories

A prolific writer with an extraordinary creative skill, Jayakanthan has written intelligent and beautifully crafted stories, profoundly human and compulsively readable. He touched several issues that others ignored or feared to raise and provoked intellectual discussions through well-chiselled characters. In an exceptionally successful literary career spanning half a century, Jayakanthan has authored 15 novels, 30 novelettes, 15 anthologies comprising over 200 short stories and about 20 collections of essays. His writings essentially centred on the travails of the downtrodden sections and the challenges that the expanding urban middle class confronted in the early years of Independence when the country was just pushed into development mode. Two of his novels, Oru Manithan, Oru Veedu, Oru Ulagam (A Man, a Home and a World), considered his masterpiece, and Jaya Jaya Sankara, besides Oru Ilakkiyavaadhiyin Arasiyal Anubavangal (A Literary Man's Political Experiences), a collection of autobiographical essays, have been rendered into English. Many of his short stories have been translated into other Indian and foreign languages.- Courtesy-The Frontline