An editors' list
Malayalam's readership is out of all proportion to the size of the state that produces it, and the writing has the confidence that comes with that. This is a route in — a novel that reads like a thriller, a memoir that caused a scandal, and a poem that is still argued about a century later.
6 books
Benyamin · 2008 · Malayalam
Benyamin's novel about a Malayali migrant enslaved on a goat farm in the Saudi desert, and what survival costs him. It became the biggest Malayalam bestseller of its generation and reached English as Goat Days. Start here: it reads like a thriller and sits like a documentary.
Basheer, Vaikom Muhammad, Vokom M. Basheer · 1980 · Malayalam
Three novellas by Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, who wrote the way people actually talk — a scandal when he began and the reason he is still read. If you only ever read one Malayalam writer, the argument for it being Basheer is that nobody else sounds like anyone at all afterwards.
അമ്ബികാസുതൻ മാങ്ങാട് · 2009 · Malayalam
Ambikasutan Mangad wrote this out of the aerial spraying of endosulfan over Kasaragod and the generation of children it damaged. A novel doing the work that reporting could not get anyone to read.
Sister Jesme · 2009 · Malayalam
Sister Jesme's account of decades inside a convent and why she finally left it. It was received less as a memoir than as an accusation, which tells you something about how little of this had been said in Malayalam before.
T.D. Ramakrishnan, ടി. ഡി രാമകൃഷ്ണൻ · 2009 · Malayalam
T. D. Ramakrishnan's sprawl of a novel — secret societies, mathematics, the spice trade, and a great deal that readers argued bitterly about. Divisive on purpose, and a good demonstration that the tradition is not all social realism.
Kumaran Asan · 1978 · Malayalam
Kumaran Asan's narrative poem, in which a Namboodiri woman flees the Malabar violence and shelters with a Pulaya man. Asan put caste at the centre of Malayalam poetry and the argument has not finished.
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