Sasthamkotta, in the Kollam district of Kerala, is best known for the freshwater lake at its centre, the largest in the state and a place of some ecological peculiarity. K. R. Meera was born in the village on 19 February 1970, took her pre-degree at the local Devaswom Board college, and went on to become one of the fiercest and most internationally read voices in contemporary Malayalam fiction. Her novels are about power, and specifically about what women do when they find themselves holding some of it.

From Sasthamkotta to a Newsroom

After her early education in Kollam district she studied for a master's degree in communicative English at the Gandhigram Rural Institute in Dindigul, across the border in Tamil Nadu. In 1993 she joined Malayala Manorama, the largest-circulation Malayalam daily, as its first woman journalist. She worked there for thirteen years, rising to senior sub-editor, before resigning in 2006 to write full time.

The journalism matters to the fiction. Her prose has a reporter's discipline about detail and a reporter's instinct for the specific, verifiable, uncomfortable fact. It also gave her a close view of institutional power in Kerala, of how newsrooms, courts, political parties and families actually make decisions, and that view runs through everything she has written since.

Hangwoman

Her breakthrough came in 2012 with Aarachar, published in English as Hangwoman in a translation by J. Devika. The novel is narrated by Chetna Grddha Mullick, a young woman in Kolkata from a family that has supplied hangmen to the state for generations, who is about to become India's first woman executioner. It is a long, dense, ferocious book that moves between the family's mythologised history and a present in which a television channel is turning Chetna's appointment into a ratings event.

What makes it remarkable is its refusal to be a single thing. It is a novel about capital punishment, about the media's appetite for spectacle, about caste and hereditary occupation, about Kolkata's layered history, and above all about a woman weighing whether to accept an instrument of absolute power and what accepting it would make her. It was serialised before publication and became a phenomenon in Kerala.

The awards followed rapidly and comprehensively. It won the Odakkuzhal Award and the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for novel in 2013, the Vayalar Award in 2014, and the Kendra Sahitya Akademi Award in 2015. In English translation it was shortlisted for major prizes and brought her a substantial international readership.

The Wider Body of Work

Meera had already established herself as a short-story writer before the novel. Her collection Ave Maria won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for story in 2009. Her novella Meerasadhu, published in 2008 and translated as The Poison of Love, is a compressed, brutal account of a woman who abandons an established life for a man and ends up in Vrindavan among the widows, and it is probably her most concentrated piece of writing.

Her later novels include Ghathakan, translated as Assassin, a long book that folds economic crime, insurance fraud and a woman under threat into an examination of how money reorganises Kerala society. Qabar is a shorter and stranger work, a novella touching on magic realism in which a woman judge hears a case about a disputed grave, written with the Babri Masjid dispute in the background and handled through implication rather than assertion.

Across all of it there is a recognisable set of preoccupations. Her protagonists are almost always women who are competent, intelligent and in some way institutionally placed, and the drama comes from what that position costs them. She writes desire explicitly and violence without flinching, and she has been attacked for both. She has also been consistently, publicly political, on communalism, on the treatment of women writers, and on the state of free expression in India.

Position in Malayalam Letters

K. R. Meera occupies an unusual place. She is a serious literary novelist who is also genuinely popular, whose books sell in large numbers in Malayalam and are translated promptly into English and other Indian languages. She has arguably done more than any writer of her generation to carry contemporary Malayalam fiction to readers outside Kerala.

Her books have been translated into English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and several European languages, and she is regularly invited to literary festivals in India and abroad. Her work has also moved into other media, with film and stage adaptations drawn from her novels and stories, and she has written screenplays herself.

She is married to M. S. Dileep, a journalist, and they have a daughter, Shruti. She continues to live and write in Kerala, and to publish at a pace that suggests the newsroom habits never entirely wore off. The village of Sasthamkotta, where she grew up and did her first college course, remains a recurring point of reference in the interviews she gives about how she began.