Celebrating Gangadhar Chittal in the Year of His Birth Centenary

Jayant Kaikini is a Kannada poet, short-story writer, columnist and playwright, as well as a lyricist and script writer for films. He won the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi award for his debut poetry collection in 1974, at the age of nineteen, followed by three more (1982, 1989, 1996) for his short-story collections. Born in the coastal temple-town of Gokarna, Kaikini is a biochemist by training and worked in the pharmaceutical industry in Mumbai for two decades before moving to Bengaluru, where he currently resides with his family. He has received the Katha Award for Creative Fiction (1996) and the Kusumagraj National Literary Award (2010). He is the recipient of the Karnataka State Award for Best Dialogue (2003) and Best Lyrics (2006), and the Filmfare Award for Best Lyrics (2008, 2009, 2016, 2017, 2022). His latest literary works in Kannada are Anarkaliya Safety Pin (2021) and Vichitra Senana Vaikhari (2021). No Presents Please, his volume of selected Mumbai stories, translated by Tejaswini Niranjana, is the first book in translation to have won the DSC South Asian Literature Prize in 2018. His most recent publications include a translation of his short story collection, Mithun Number Two, and a prose collection, Taari Dande.