Imayam (writer)

Imayam (pen name of V. Annamalai) is an Indian Tamil-language novelist from Chennai, Tamil Nadu.

He has eight novels, eight short story collections and a novella to his credit.

Widely acknowledged for his realist mode of writing, his stories are known for their incisive exploration of societal intricacies.

Closely associated with the Dravidian Movement and its politics, he is considered as one of the leading writers from South India.

He was born on 10 March 1964 into a peasant family in Kazhudur, a village in Tittakudi taluk of present-day Cuddalore district, Tamil Nadu.

He had his college education at Periyar E.V.R. College.

Tiruchirappalli.

It was S. Albert, a Professor from Trichy who 'opened the door to the world' for him.

He later moved to Vriddhachalam and continued his writing.

He is married to Pushpavalli and has two sons - Kathiravan Annamalai and Tamilselvan Annamalai.

He is the brother of Labour Welfare and Skill Development Minister of Tamil Nadu.

Rooted in the Dravidian literary tradition, Imayam seeks to present the lives of ordinary women and men living on the fringes in the northern coastal districts of Tamil Nadu, their everyday problems and inequalities in a language that employs raw candour.

In doing so, Imayam has consistently sought to bring out the subtlety and intensity with which caste works in individual lives, often wreaking havoc.

Imayam's women and men are the people we meet in our daily lives.

Sometimes the stories are intimate portrayals of women whose indomitable spirit finds a way to express itself when faced with toughest of challenges; sometimes they are about men vulnerable enough to let go of their egos; sometimes they feel like they're about us.

So it doesn't come as a surprise when the writer says that he draws his stories from his life.

“I write the stories of those who live with me in my family, my neighbourhood, my street, my village.

I write the stories they told me, the stories I see, the stories I have heard, the stories I live.

I write my life; I write how I live.”

Koveru Kazhudhaigal is about a family of Dalit launderers who wash the clothes of other Dalit people, receiving grain and other food in return.

The novel is constructed between two journeys: a pilgrimage of hope at the beginning; a routine trip to the washing pool in drudgery and despair in the end.

Imayam invents for the protagonist Arokkyam a particular spoken style; often relying on a string of related exclamations, it is very similar to a formal lament.

He presents an ebullient mix of the past, present and future in his works.

He was barely 18 when he finished the first draft of the novel.

About Koveru Kazhudaigal.

the writer Sundara Ramasamy wrote "There is no novel that equals this one in the last 100 years of Tamil writing."

Koveru Kazhudhaigal won the Agni Aksara Award from the Tamil Nadu Progressive Writers' Forum (1994), the Amudhan Adigal Ilakkiya Award for Literature (1998) and was honored with a state award.

The English translation of Koveru Kazhudaigal.

appeared as ' Beasts of Burden' in 2001.

It was translated into English again in 2006, and was also translated into Malayalam.

In an introduction to Beasts of Burden, Imayam writes that"'The world is an ocean, in which concepts and theories are like ships which appear and disappear. My works were not composed with the comfort offered by these ships, but written from within the sea and by looking at its vastness.' The result is that this story, rooted in specificities of a certain experience, has a resounding universality: it is simply about how life goes on."

Koveru Kazhuthaigal gives us an extraordinarily detailed picture of a lifestyle that has now passed; a lifestyle that is reclaimed and told with pride, without any attempt to ‘Sanskritize' it.

That is, there is no supposition that the lifestyles of the upper castes (vegetarianism, Brahminic rituals, etc.) are, or ought to be, the norm.

He is the recipient of the honorary Sahitya Akademi Award for his novel Selladha Panam in 2020.

He is also the first Tamil writer to receive the Kuvempu Rashtriya Puraskar National Award (2022) for bringing new sensibilites to Tamil literature through his writings.

Noting the writer's proclivity to Dravidian ideals, the Tamil Nadu chief minister M.K.Stalin called him "an ideologue donned in black and red".

He lauded Imayam calling him a "proactive writer" in the Dravidian movement.

Agni Aksra Award, the Tamil Nadu Progressive Writers Association Award, the N.L.C. Award, and the Thamizh Thendral Thiru.V.Ka.

Award from the state government of Tamil Nadu are bestowed upon him for his literary contributions that captures the realities around him, about Dalits, caste, patriarchy, women, injustice and oppression.

He has been honored by the governments of Kerala, Tamil Nadu and India for his literary legacy that spans around almost three decades.