R. K. Narayan

R. K. Narayan, born Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami, was an Indian novelist who wrote in English. He lived from 1906 to 2001, a span that took him from British India to the independent republic. He is best known for his books set in Malgudi, a fictional town in South India. Together with Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao, he helped establish Indian writing in English as a serious literary tradition. His particular achievement was to show how the everyday life of ordinary people can reveal the tension between tradition and modernity.

Narayan was born in 1906 in Madras, now Chennai, into a Tamil Brahmin family. His father was a school headmaster, and because the family moved often, Narayan spent much of his childhood in the care of his maternal grandmother, Parvati, who gave him the nickname Kunjappa. He read widely, among others Dickens, Wodehouse, Conan Doyle and Hardy. It took him four years to finish his degree. After a brief spell as a schoolteacher, he resolved to devote himself to writing. His first novel, Swami and Friends, appeared in 1935 after a string of rejections. It introduced Malgudi and brought him the support of Graham Greene, who helped find a publisher and advised him to shorten his name for English readers. Narayan's wife, Rajam, died of typhoid in 1939, and he never remarried.

His style is plain, clear and gently ironic. He was less interested in political protest than in watching how customs shift. The shopkeepers, lawyers, beggars and businessmen of Malgudi live alongside religious tradition and a modernity that arrives without asking permission. Recurring themes include the weight of convention, such as horoscope matching in marriage or corporal punishment in schools, and the pressures inside families. His short stories have been compared with those of Guy de Maupassant for their compression, and his invented town with the imaginary landscapes of William Faulkner.

His legacy is that of a writer who brought ordinary Indian life to readers across the world. He received the AC Benson Medal in 1980, the Padma Bhushan and the Padma Vibhushan, and in 1994 the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship. He was also nominated to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian Parliament. For many years he was, before Salman Rushdie, the best-known narrator of Indian origin in the English-speaking world.