K. R. Meera (born 19 February 1970) is an Indian novelist and short-story writer in Malayalam. A former journalist, she became one of the most widely read authors in Kerala with Aarachaar (2012), a novel about a young woman from a family of hereditary executioners, which won the Sahitya Akademi Award and in English translation as Hangwoman brought her a readership across India and abroad. Her fiction deals with love, power and violence in the lives of women.
Quick Facts
| Full name | K. R. Meera |
| Born | 19 February 1970, Sasthamkotta, Kollam district, Kerala |
| Age | 56 |
| Occupation | Novelist, short-story writer, former journalist |
| Language | Malayalam |
| Notable works | Aarachaar (Hangwoman), Meerasadhu (The Poison of Love), Yudasinte Suvishesham (The Gospel of Yudas), Ghathakan (Assassin), Qabar, Ave Maria |
| Education | Gandhigram Rural Institute, Dindigul (M.A. Communicative English) |
| Awards | Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award (2009, 2013); Vayalar Award (2014); Kendra Sahitya Akademi Award (2015) |
| Spouse | M. S. Dileep |
Early Life
Meera was born at Sasthamkotta, in Kollam district, the daughter of two college teachers. She studied at a college in Kollam and took a master’s degree in communicative English at the Gandhigram Rural Institute in Tamil Nadu.
Journalist
In 1993 she joined the daily Malayala Manorama at Kottayam, one of the first women on its news desk. Her reports and series on the conditions of women workers and on children won several national awards for human rights and development journalism. She rose to be a senior sub-editor. In 2006 she resigned to write fiction full time.
Fiction
Stories
Her first collection, Ormayude Njarambu (“The Vein of Memory”), appeared in 2002. Mohamanja, Ave Maria, which won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for the short story in 2009, and Guillotine followed. The stories are compact and often shocking, about desire, betrayal and political disillusionment.
Aarachaar
Aarachaar was serialised in a weekly magazine and published as a book in 2012. It is set in Kolkata and narrated by Chetna Grddha Mullick, twenty-two years old, whose family claims a lineage of executioners going back more than two thousand years. When her aged father cannot carry out a hanging, she is appointed in his place, the first woman in the job, and becomes the object of a television channel’s campaign and of the attentions of its manipulative anchor. The novel weaves the family’s legends through a story about the death penalty, the media and a woman’s hold on her own life.
It won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award, the Odakkuzhal Award, the Vayalar Award and, in 2015, the national Sahitya Akademi Award, and has sold well over a hundred thousand copies in Malayalam. J. Devika’s translation, Hangwoman (2014), was shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.
Other novels
Meerasadhu, translated as The Poison of Love, tells of a brilliant woman who ends among the widows of Vrindavan. Aa Maratheyum Marannu Marannu Njan and Yudasinte Suvishesham, set in the aftermath of the Naxalite movement and the Emergency, are short novels of memory and guilt. Sooryane Aninja Oru Sthree, published in English as Jezebel, follows a doctor through a divorce court. Ghathakan (2021), translated as Assassin, begins with an attempt on a woman’s life on the night of the demonetisation of 2016 and becomes her investigation of her own past. Qabar is a brief, dreamlike novel about a judge and a disputed burial site.
Other Work
She co-wrote the screenplay of the Malayalam film Ore Kadal (2007), has written for children and writes newspaper columns. She speaks frequently on women’s rights and freedom of expression and has been criticised and abused online for her political views.
Personal Life
She is married to the journalist M. S. Dileep, and they have a daughter, Shruthi. She lives in Kottayam.
Featured image: K. R. Meera at the Kerala Literature Festival, Kozhikode, February 2016. Photo by Vengolis, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
