Dr. Lakshmi Kannan is a poet, novelist, short story writer and translator. Her recent books include Guilt Trip and Other Stories (Niyogi, 2023); Nadistuti, Poems (Authors Press, 2024); The Glass Bead Curtain, a historical novel on Madras Presidency during British rule (2020, c2016, Vitasta); Wooden Cow, translation of the iconic novel by T. Janakiraman (Orient BlackSwan, 2021), and Sipping the Jasmine Moon, Poems, with a Foreword by Jayanta Mahapatra (Authors Press, 2019). For more details, please see her entry in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Indian Writing in English, pp. 217-218 (2023).
In Tamil, Lakshmi has published one novel and five collections of short stories in her pen-name ‘Kaaveri’. She translated all of them into English for Orient Black Swan’s project on translations. Her novel titled Aatthukku Poganum (Going Home) takes up the contentious issue of the disinheritance of daughters, despite the Hindu Succession Act of 1959. Reissued for the fourth time in 2023, it continues to generate new debates on the legal issue.
Lakshmi was a Resident Writer at the University of Iowa, USA; a Charles Wallace Writer at the University of Kent at Canterbury, U.K.; British Council Visitor to the University of Cambridge, U.K.; Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, H.P; Fellow, Sahitya Akademi, Delhi. She attended the International Feminist Book Fairs at Montreal, Canada, and Amsterdam, the Netherlands, as a delegate. She taught English in colleges in Delhi, Calcutta and at IIT- Delhi before she joined a corporate multinational organization as a Senior Writer and Language Coordinator.
C T Indra: ‘For the past two decades or more, Lakshmi Kannan has been a presence to reckon with in the field of contemporary Indian literature – both in English and the Bhashas. She has been writing both poetry and fiction, in English and in Tamil (in the pen-name of “Kaaveri”). What is more, she has been an excellent translator of her own Tamil works in English. She has achieved wide recognition and is featured in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures (Ed. Eugene Benson and R.W. Conolly) both in the original edition of 1994 and its revised edition in 2005. She is well acquainted with global literary and cultural traditions, has travelled widely and been awarded prestigious international and national fellowships. She has at once an unmistakably native sensibility (which is accentuated by her being a Tamil from Karnataka, living in Delhi) which blends seamlessly with her transnational, transcultural awareness. In one sense it may be right to claim that poetry is her forte, for even in her short fiction, it is her vivid poetical imagination, precision and richness of vocabulary that heighten the atmospheric and textual intensity of her stories. But this is not to deny the ideological concerns that have gripped her and the serious manner in which she has engaged with them, be it poetry or fiction .’
“Phenomenological Explorations”, Introduction to Nandanvan & Other Stories by Lakshmi Kannan.
