Ki. Rajanarayanan was born in 1923 as the fifth child of Sri Krishna Ramanujam and Lakshmi Ammal at Idaiseval village near Kovilpatti in the Tirunelveli District of Tamil Nadu. Their ancestors belonged to the Telugu speaking Andhra country. Ki.Ra, as he is popularly known, was formally educated only till Class Eight. He gathered knowledge outside the precincts of the school by voracious reading and keen and sympathetic observation of the world around him. His creative instincts were whetted by the stories he heard from his father.
Gopalla Gramam, the author's first novel, was published in 1976. Written in a direct manner like a good story teller the author used a people's language to tell a people's tale. The energy and economy of expression and the wealth of descriptive detail, the interesting intertwining of myth and lived reality in telling the story have earned a special place for this work in contemporary Tamil fiction. While the 'casual' reader is well-entertained, which is the story teller's first intention, the 'serious' reader has adequate substance in the novel to trigger his own critical and creative quests. This work is a precursor to developments in Tamil fiction that gathered momentum from the 1990's.
The author was given the Sahitya Akademi Award for the novel Gopallapurattu Makkal in 1991. The author has more than thirty published works to his credit. Particularly important is his compilation Vattara Vazhakku Akaradi, a compilation of Tamil words of local usage in Tamil. Ki.Ra resides in Puducherry. He is a Visiting Professor in the Dept of Folklore, University of Puducherry. M.Vijayalakshmi (b. 1948) is a retired Librarian. She has translated the novels and short stories of several contemporary Tamil writers such as Thoppil Meeran, Neela Padmanabhan, D.Dilip Kumar, Jayamohan and others.
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