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 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.

About the Translator

Tejaswini Niranjana won the Central Sahitya Akademi Prize for her translation of M. K. Indira’s Phaniyamma (1989) and the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi Prize for her translation of Niranjana’s Mrityunjaya (1996). She has also translated Pablo Neruda’s poetry and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar into Kannada. Her translations into English include Vaidehi’s Gulabi Talkies (2006). She grew up in Bangalore and has studied and worked in Mumbai. She taught at Lingnan University, Hong Kong before moving to Ahmedabad University, where she is Director of the Centre for Inter-Asian Research. Her translation of Jayant Kaikini’s stories, No Presents Please, won the DSC South Asian Literature Prize in 2018.