Lakshmi Kannan

Dr. Lakshmi Kannan is a poet, novelist, short story writer and translator. Lakshmi Kannan’s Guilt Trip and Other Stories (Niyogi Books, Delhi, 2023) hwas chosen as The Best Book of the Year” in the India Section of the Annual Bibliography for Literature, Critique and the Empire Today, 2023 (formerly called The Journal of Commonwealth Literature), compiled and edited by Shyamala A. Narayan and Payal Nagpal. Her other recent books include 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 Encyclopaedia of Indian Writing in English, pp. 217-218 (2023).

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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 Blackswan’s project on translations. They are cited under Translations in this site. Her recent books include her select short fiction titled Kaaveri Kathaigal (Her Stories, Chennai, 2025) which won an award by “Kavithai Uravu”, Chennai, and the 4th edition of her novel Aathukku Poganum (Coimbatore, Siruvani Vasagar Vattam, 2023). This novel takes up the contentious issue of women’s disinheritance from family property, despite the Hindu Succession Act of 1969. The book continues to generate new debates on the legal issue.

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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.; and Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, H.P. 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 for several years before she joined a corporate multinational organization as a Senior Writer and Language Coordinator.

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The well-known critic C T Indra writes: ‘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 Encyclopaedia of Post- Colonial Literatures (Ed. Eugene Benson and R.W. Conolly) both in the original edition of 1994 and its revised edition in 2005. Lakshmi Kannan has created in a couple of striking stories such as "A Sky All Around" eschatological situations, with characters hovering between life and death, and life after death. These are feats of phenomenological explorations leading to a strange epistemology, but no less human. The Gothic mode in "Please, Dear God" makes a hospital look like a Dantean purgatory. The story "Nandanvan" is in the tradition of an Indian fable where birds are given the role of observing and passing moral judgements on humans. Lakshmi achieves something extraordinary in representing fabulatory enounters in such stories. Her word-horde is amazing from which she quarries the most appropriate and revealing expressions.’

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From "Phenomenological Explorations: Introducing Lakshmi Kannan's Fiction" by C.T.Indra in her Introduction to Nandanvan & Other Stories (Orient Blackswan, New Delhi, 2011)