Kamala Das (1934-2009) was recognized as one of India’s foremost poets. She was the author of several novels, collections of poetry and short stories in English as well as in Malayalam, in which she wrote as Madhavikutty. Some of her works in English include the novel Alphabet of Lust (1977), a collection of short stories, Padmavati the Harlot and Other Stories (1992), the poetry collections Summer in Calcutta (1965), The Descendants (1967), The Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1973) and Only the Soul Knows How to Sing (1996). She received several awards including the PEN Poetry Prize and the Sahitya Akademi Award. She was also nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1984. Her works have been translated into a number of languages including French, Spanish, Russian, German and Japanese.

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Born in 1934 in Kerala, Kamala Das was the author of several novels, collections of poetry and short stories in English as well as Malayalam. First published in Malayalam in 1973, My Story, her sensational autobiography, shocked readers with its total disregard for mindless conventions and its fearless articulation of subjects still considered taboo. Depicting the author’s intensely personal experiences in her passage to womanhood and shedding light on the hypocrisies that informed traditional society, this memoir was far ahead of its time and is now acknowledged as a bona fide masterpiece