Author
S. Hareesh
S. Hareesh
S. Hareesh is a Malayalam writer from the southern Indian state of Kerala. He is the author of three novels – Meesha, August 17 and Pattunoolpuzhu – and three short story collections – Adam, Appan and Rasavidyayude Charithram. Twice the recipient of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award, the highest literary prize in the state, he has also received other accolades including the Geetha Hiranyan Endowment and the Thomas Mundassery Prize. In 2020, his debut novel Moustache, translated into English by Jayasree Kalathil, won the JCB Prize for literature. Pattunoolpuzhu (Silkworm) is his third novel and has won the P. Padmarajan Award and the Basheer Sahitya Puraskaram. Hareesh is also an award-winning writer of screenplays. His credits include the 2019 film Jallikattu, which was India’s official entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 93rd Academy Awards, and Nanpakalnerathu Mayakkam, which won the Rajatha Chakoram Award at the 2022 International Film Festival of Kerala
Translator
Jayasree Kalathil
Jayasree Kalathil
Jayasree Kalathil is a bilingual writer and translator working with Malayalam and English. She is the author of The Sackclothman, a children’s book that has been translated into Malayalam, Telugu and Hindi. Her translations have twice won the Crossword Book Jury Award for Translation (Diary of a Malayali Madman by N. Prabhakaran in 2019 and Maria, Just Maria by Sandhya Mary in 2024), the 2020 JCB Prize for Literature (Moustache by S. Hareesh), the 2023 V. Abdulla Memorial Translation Award (Valli by Sheela Tomy), and the 2024 Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Award (Maria, Just Maria). Valli was also shortlisted for the 2023 ALTA National Translation Award for Prose. As part of the global effort #readpalestine, Jayasree has translated into Malayalam works by Palestinian poets Mahmoud Darwish, Refaat Alareer, Hiba Abu Nada, Samih al-Qasim, and Mosab Abu Toha. She is also the managing editor for translation fiction at the Bombay Literary Magazine. Originally from Malappuram district in Kerala, India, Jayasree lives in the New Forest in Hampshire, UK.
Original language
Malayalam
Publishing status
Translation extract
About the book
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About the book
Samsa, an imaginative, introverted boy of thirteen, wakes up one morning feeling that someone else is walking with him, seeing and experiencing everything he does. Only his dog, Ilu, named after ‘the most useless letter in the Malayalam alphabet,’ and the brooding hen can sense this person. The story is set in 1992, a time of economic, social and lifestyle changes, in a village on the peripheries of a city in Kerala, in the three months that sees Samsa move from childhood to adolescence. The novel engages with the themes of love, loss, sorrow and solitude. Time is relational; the distance between the real and the unreal, fact and fiction, is short. After all, the world of stories and the world of human beings are made up of both.
Rights available
World English