Six decades. Several different lives, lived in parallel. Read this as a guide to the rest of the notebook, the bars overlap because the roles did.
Co-written with his grandson, Rudra Raghava, the third generation now collaborating on the page. The brief is to make it land for a reader who is exactly eight, without softening the chemistry. Drafting weekly.
Not a defence of the tools, not a refusal of them. A working investigation, what changes in the writer's process, and what does not, taken into rooms of fiction and non-fiction writers.
A reading practice as much as a teaching one, line edits, structural notes, the long argument with a writer about what their book is actually about. Several manuscripts in correspondence at any time.
Tiruvaiyaru, on the bend of the Cauvery, between the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth. An orthodox Brahmin family. Panju, a brilliant boy, walks out into the early stirrings of the freedom movement. His sister Janaki sets out to become the first local woman with a college education. Their father Sambu, the temple dancer Ranjitham, a household and a town caught between an old order and what is coming.
It is written from the inside, the Tamil-Brahmin world rendered without the curator's distance, in a cadence that carries the river.
I chose to write the novel as an insider, not from the point of view of a tourist. , The author, in Sruti's BookBlog interview
The Astu Devas, mishearing the prayers of two citizens of Orum, grant exactly what is asked for, and the town is sealed off from the rest of civilisation. To break the curse, a reluctant fiancée, a thief, and an aspiring playwright must steal a blood jewel from the demonic goddess Rakta Katteri, guarded by the Sorcerer of Mandala.
Built on Indian folk mythology, told with a dry, precise comic timing. Illustrated by his son, Raghava KK, the second generation pulling the work forward.
Funny, witty and clever. A book that made me laugh out loud at times, or chuckle quietly to myself at other times. , The Reading Desk
A short, no-ornament guide to writing well, distilled from years of mentoring novelists and short-story writers. Each rule is a chapter; each chapter a workshop in miniature, with exercises and checklists that ask the reader to do the work, not nod at it.
Subtitled 10 Rules to Be a Better Writer. The rules are practical, the examples are specific, and the editor's red pen is implicit on every page.
Clear, no-nonsense, structured around 10 practical steps, each chapter focusing on a specific element, clarity, tone, editing, storytelling. , From the publisher
Kalyanaraman Durgadas does a wonderful job with his debut novel. How it ends is a wonderful and twisted story.
Sruti's BookBlogon Songs of the CauveryRead full review →
Funny, witty and clever. A book that made me laugh out loud at times, or chuckle quietly to myself at other times.
The Reading Deskon The Sorcerer of MandalaSource →
A look back at one of the most interesting times in Indian history. Visual details intricately observed; the kind of book one cannot put down.
Goodreads readerson Songs of the CauveryRead on Goodreads →
Adjudged the best debut novel in 2016, winning the Anupam Kher award. Longlisted and shortlisted for several others, reviewed favourably across Indian publications.
Mysuru Literature Festivalspeaker introduction, 2023Speaker page →
Ganesatatwasudhalahari, a two-hundred-verse Sanskrit work composed by his great-grandfather, survived as a manuscript in the family. It is now translated, by the great-grandson, into Tamil and English: a single document making three crossings of language, and a long correspondence completed across more than a century.
It sits beside other translation work in the catalogue, Forgotten Heroines from Tamil into English; Kaviriyin Geethangal, the Tamil edition of his own novel, but this one is the spine of what the threads above mean.
A 200-verse Sanskrit work by his great-grandfather, brought across two languages a hundred years later. The book of inheritance.
A translation from the Tamil, recovering women whose lives the historical record had set aside.
The Tamil edition of Songs of the Cauvery, translated by Indira Gokulachandra. A return of the novel into one of the languages it was written from inside.
Short fiction, co-edited and contributed to. Published by Writer's Collective, Bengaluru.
Short stories carried by the daily press and by collections; the form he keeps returning to between the longer projects.
He works with writers on novels and non-fiction in long correspondence, line by line where it needs that, and structurally where it does. Workshops are run in three forms.
For mentorship, workshop bookings, talks at lit fests and inside organisations, write in.
Write to him[Brief, one paragraph. What it is, what it tests, what changed in the writing because of it. Replace this placeholder.]
[link →][Brief, one paragraph. What it is, what it tests, what changed in the writing because of it.]
[link →][Short note from the author on the experiment. What worked. What did not. What it suggests for the next book.]
[link →][Brief. What was tried, why it was set aside, what was learned.]
[link →]The spine of every chapter that came before her absence. She co-founded the businesses, raised three sons who refused to choose just one thing each, and held the household to the standard of clarity she demanded of any draft.
The family made a book for her. Read Leela →
PhD, Harvard, econometrics, with key work on causal inference. Taught at UCL. Took the long road from data science back to art and became a writer and critic on aesthetic theory. With his brother Raghava he co-founded 64/1, the Bangalore arts-research collective that argues, in public, about what AI does and doesn't do to art. Lectures, curates, teaches.
Quit school at seventeen to draw editorial cartoons, and is now an internationally exhibited artist working between India and New York, across painting, sculpture, AI systems, and large philosophical projects on belief and identity. TED speaker; CNN named him one of the ten most remarkable people of 2010. Illustrated The Sorcerer of Mandala, the first instance, in this house, of one generation publishing the next.
Two decades in Australia turning unruly data into things organisations can actually act on. The brother who builds the spreadsheets the others quietly consult when they need a number that survives scrutiny. Carries the longest surname in the family, the full Cauvery delta lineage spelled out, and arguably the most exact instinct in the house for what is signal and what is noise.
