Kirin Narayan (born November 1959) is an Indian-born American anthropologist, folklorist and writer.
Early life, education, and career
Narayan is the daughter of Narayan Ramji Contractor, a civil engineer from Nashik, and Didi Kinzinger, a German-American "artist, decorator, and builder of sustainable housing".[1]
Narayan was born in Bombay, attended school in India and came to the United States in 1976.[2]
In 1989, Narayan published Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching.[7] It received the Victor Turner Prize from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology[8] and was co-winner of the Elsie Clews Prize for Folklore from the American Folklore Society.[6]
In 1994, she published the novel Love, Stars and All That.[9] Reviewing the novel, Indian poet and editor Dom Moraes praised the work, saying:
"This is a novel well received and achieved: it is also intelligent, excellently written, and revelatory of what it is like to be an American born in India. It makes one feel Narayan is that very rare bird, a born writer, and that she may fly far."[10]
Narayan published Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales in 1997.[11] In 2002 a new edition of the first collection of Indian folk tales in English, Mary Frere's Old Deccan Days, was published with an introduction by Narayan.[12] In 2007, she published a memoir My Family and Other Saints.[3][4][13] An autobiographical work in which "Gods, gurus and eccentric relatives compete for primacy", The New York Times described the work as an "enchanting memoir".[14] Its title is a reference to Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, a childhood inspiration to Narayan.[15]
In her 2012 work Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov,[16] Narayan used Anton Chekhov's Sakhalin Island as inspiration for an exploration of ethnographic writing. James Wood, writing of his 'Books of the Year' in The New Yorker, described it as a "brief and brilliant book" that he read "with huge pleasure".[17] In 2016 Narayan published Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses in the Himalayan Foothills, about women's traditions of singing in the Kangra Valley.[18]
References
^ abSharma, Maya (2000). "Kirin Narayan". In Emmanuel Sampath Nelson (ed.). Asian American Novelists: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 257. ISBN0313309116.
^"Professor Kirin Narayan". ANU Researchers - Research Services Division. Australian National University. Retrieved 30 August 2017.
Dellenbaugh, Ginger; Rahaim, Matthew (April 2018). "Reviews". Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies. 3 (1): 95–100. doi:10.1386/jivs.3.1.95_5.
Stirr, Anna (May 2018). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 24 (2): 413–414. doi:10.1111/1467-9655.12845.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: untitled periodical (link)