Awards

• Winner of DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2021
• Winner of National Prize for Translation in Prose 2021

Overview

No Presents Please is a vivid evocation of city life, exploring the sub-locales and spatial identities of Mumbai and the struggles of small-town migrants. Jayant Kaikini’s gaze takes in the people living on the margins – a bus driver who, when denied annual leave, steals the bus to travel home; a slum dweller who catches cats and sells them for pharmaceutical testing; a father at his wit’s end who takes his mischievous son to a reform institution. From Irani cafes to chawls, old cinema halls to local trains, the author seeks out and illuminates moments and feelings of existential anxiety, pathos and tenderness. In these sixteen prize-winning stories, cracks in the curtains of the ordinary open up to possibilities that might not have existed, but for this city, which surprises with its epiphanies, fantasies and ambitions.

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9781911284482

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Jayant Kaikini is a Kannada poet, short story writer, columnist, and playwright, as well as an award-winning lyricist and script and dialogue writer for Kannada films. He won his first Karnataka Sahitya Akademi Award at the age of nineteen in 1974 and has since won the award three times, in addition to winning various other awards in India, including the first Kusumagraj Rashtriya Bhasha Sahitya Puraskar. 'No Presents Please', his volume of selected stories translated by Tejaswini Niranjana, is the first book in translation to have won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Tejaswini Niranjana won the Central Sahitya Akademi Award for best translation of M. K. Indira’s 'Phaniyamma' (1989) and the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi Award 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 is currently professor of cultural studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong.

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