R. K. Narayan (in conjunction with the Wallace Literary Agency) Archives - Andrew Nurnberg Associates International Ltd.Andrew Nurnberg Associates International Ltd.

R. K. Narayan (in conjunction with the Wallace Literary Agency)

R.K. Narayan was born in 1906 in Madras, South India, and educated there and at Maharaja’s College in Mysore. His writing spans the greatest period of change in modern Indian history, from the days of the Raj to recent years of political unrest. He is one of a few writers credited with bringing Indian literature in English to the rest of the world, which he did with the help of friend and mentor Graham Greene. His first, semi-autobiographical, novel, Swami and Friends, was published in 1935 and like many of his subsequent works is set in the fictional town of Malgudi. His novel The Guide (1958) won him the National Prize of the Indian Literary Academy, his country’s highest honour. As well as five collections of short stories, he published two travel books, four volumes of essays, retellings of popular legends, a volume of memoirs, and a collection of three novellas. In 1980 he was awarded the A.C. Benson Medal by the Royal Society of Literature and in 1981 he was made an Honorary Member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He was also nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature multiple times. R.K. Narayan died in 2001.

“Whom next shall I meet in Malgudi? That is the thought that comes to me when I close a novel of Mr Narayan’s. I do not wait for another novel. I wait to go out of my door into those loved and shabby streets and see with excitement and a certainty of pleasure a stranger approaching, past the bank, the cinema, the haircutting saloon, a stranger who will greet me I know with some unexpected and revealing phrase that will open a door on to yet another human existence.”

– Graham Greene

Bibliography

Novels