Gayathri Prabhu

Gayathri Prabhu is the author of the novels Vetaal and Vikram: Riddles of the Undead (HarperCollins, 2019), The Untitled (Fourth Estate, HarperCollins, 2016), Birdswim Fishfly (Rupa Publications, 2006), and Maya (Indialog Publications, 2003).

A playful retelling of India's most celebrated cycle of stories, Vetaal and Vikram was published by HarperCollins India in October 2019. The narrative of King Vikram and the Vetaal is originally found in the Kathasaritsagara, an eleventh-century Sanskrit text. The Vetaal is neither alive nor dead, but a consummate storyteller who enthralls his listener, King Vikram. King Vikram can neither speak nor remain silent, according to the conditions set by Vetaal in this narrative cycle. In 1870, eleven of the Vetaal's stories were adapted to English by the famed scholar-explorer Richard Francis Burton. Prabhu's Vetaal and Vikram is a contemporary, inventive work that plays with form while including Burton within its storytelling folds. It challenges the narrative possibilities of a retelling, implicating the reader within the text. Widely read and reviewed, Vetaal and Vikram balances the nostalgic with the present, promising something new and challenging for every reader.

If I Had to Tell It Again received several positive reviews in the months following its publication. Writer, editor, and columnist, Krupa Ge writes in First Post: “Gayathri’s sparkling prose is light, as it meanders artfully conveying memories heavy, laden with emotions”. Poet Arundhathi Subramaniam praises If I Had to Tell it Again “for its mix of candour, poise and urgency in a fiercely loving portrait of a parent” while choosing it among her best reads of the year. Professor of English at Ashoka University, Madhavi Menon describes the memoir as a “daring and brave challenge to our preconceptions both about writing and about depression” in her review titled “Real Fathers in All Their Frailty”, featured in The Wire. Urvashi Bahuguna in the Scroll calls it “a book unlike any other we have seen in India.” The memoir has also been reviewed in The Shrinking Couch, the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, The Indian Express, The News Minute, Research and Humanities in Medical Education, apart from reviews by independent bloggers, and responses from artists in the form of illustrations. Interviews with Gayathri Prabhu about her memoir, the motivations and the journey of writing, were featured in The Scroll, as well as in the Deccan Chronicle and Asian Age in January 2018. At the Chandigarh Literature Festival, 2018, in a public session with author Jonathan Gil Harris on 'If I Had to Tell it Again', Prabhu spoke about writing memoirs in India.

For her work in the literary field, Prabhu won the prestigious R.K. Narayan Award for Best Writer in English in 2019 from the Booksellers and Publishers Association of South India (BAPASI) at the inauguration of the 2019 Chennai Book Fair, handed by the CM of Tamil Nadu.

Prabhu, who has regularly taught a course in Medical Humanities in the Manipal Centre for Humanities, has moved the conversation about mental health, stigma, and silence beyond the classroom, in a piece co-written as a dialogue with a student, Michael Verghese. Published in Scroll in July 2018, the collaborative conversational writing project is about the evening that Michael attempted to end his life, and revisits the transforming experience that followed through conversations with his teacher, Gayathri. Prabhu's recent piece in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics reflects on “the power of narratives to simultaneously navigate advocacy, teaching, learning, writing and scholarship”, in an article that draws from Prabhu's experience of designing and teaching a medical humanities course in an Indian classroom of literature students. A reflective piece about the reception of the memoir was written by Prabhu and published in The Economic and Political Weekly in Sep 2018, about the challenges of the memoir genre in India, the experience of disclosing sexual abuse in/ to the family, and the author's take on why a public telling matters.

She has been appointed as the Dr TMA Chair in Indian Literature at the Manipal Academy of Higher Education for 2017-2019.

Prabhu's lyrical memoir If I Had to Tell It Again, published by HarperCollins, was released in November 2017. It is written in the aftermath of a father's death, and published in the WHO's international year-long campaign on depression. The book opens the silence in Indian families around chronic sadness and addiction, and seeks to move the discourse beyond blame, guilt, and the rhetoric of family honour. Numerous reviews and responses emerged in the aftermath of the memoir's publication.

The Untitled, published in 2016 by Fourth Estate, HarperCollins India, was researched and written over a decade and across three continents. It is a novel about the coming together of Indian and Western painting traditions, against the background of the dramatic war of 1799, when the British defeated Tipu Sultan, and finally established unchallenged supremacy in the Indian sub-continent. The Wire described The Untitled as an imaginative break from the themes that have animated historical fiction in India for over a century now, namely "the temptation to be intimate with the monumental." The Huffington Post review called the prose "supple and sublime" and termed the novel as "an allegory of how art and politics cannot remain insulated from one another." The Times Lit Fest in December, 2016 had a session devoted to the novel. The Untitled has also been featured in The Times of India, The Hindu, The Telegraph, The Tribune, Sakal Times, and the Deccan Herald.

Prabhu holds an MA degree in Mass Communication from Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, an MPhil in Creative Writing from Swansea University in the United Kingdom and a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in the United States. She has published widely on literary studies and presently teaches at the Manipal Centre for Humanities, Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE).

Receiving recognition for her work at an early stage in her writing career, Prabhu won the prestigious Vreeland Award at the University of Nebraska for best creative manuscript in 2011. Less than a year after the publication of 'If I Had to Tell it Again', the memoir was longlisted under the category of Best Non Fiction (English) in the Atta Galatta Bangalore Literature Festival in September 2018. Prabhu was shortlisted as one of the five authors for the prestigious Sushila Devi Literature Award For 'The Best Book Of Fiction Written By A Woman Author', in English and published in 2016 or 2017.

The whimsical and inventive novel Birdswim Fishfly (published in 2006) was an exploration of adolescence, family secrets, and the quickening of the artistic temperament. Prabhu's first novel, Maya, published in 2003, was set in the Konkan region and drew from local and family lore as they emerged in the consciousness of a young, questioning girl. The novel was described by the Deccan Herald as “a grippingly haunting tale.”

Gayathri Prabhu (born 1974) is an Indian novelist who currently lives in Manipal, Karnataka. Her most recent book is the novel, Vetaal and Vikram: Riddles of the Undead, published by HarperCollins in 2019.