Dr. Lakshmi Kannan  is a poet, novelist, short story writer and translator. Lakshmi Kannan’s Guilt Trip and Other Stories (Niyogi Books, Delhi, 2023) has been declared as “the best book of the year” by Shyamala A. Narayan and Payal Nagpal who compiled the India section for the Annual Bibliography for LIterature, Critique and the Empire Today‘ 2023 (formerly called The Journal of Commonwealth Literature). 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 Encyclopedia 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 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.

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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.; 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.