‘Profoundly surreal, intensely melancholic and boldly exploratory.’ – Damodar Mauzo
‘N. Prabhakaran’s tales restore our sense of delight, not just in this literary form but in the crying human need for retrieving, remembering, retelling experience.’ – Anjum Hasan
‘Vividly imagined and narrated with an unfailing tenderness, these stories extend our understanding of what it means to be human.’
– N. Kalyan Raman
N. Prabhakaran arrived on the literary scene in 1971 at age eighteen, with his prize-winning story ‘The Mahout of a Rogue Elephant’. In the five decades since, across more than fifty books, he has come to be regarded as one of the pioneers of the postmodern turn in Malayalam literature.
The stories gathered here, spanning Prabhakaran’s entire writing life, move between folklore and the fantastical, nature and nightmare, as they circle around the essential aloneness of the human condition. Here you will find: a dying man whose mind keeps returning to a fistful of salt and his father’s part in the Salt Satyagraha; a stolen vessel that uncovers the hidden wounds of a marriage; two migrant workers hounded off a crowded bus on a stormy night; a rooster that fulfils a man’s dark desire…
Brought brilliantly into English for the first time by award-winning translator Jayasree Kalathil, A Fistful of Salt is a definitive introduction to the short fiction of one of Malayalam’s most significant and enduring writers.
***
N. Prabhakaran says, ‘The thirty stories in this collection represent nearly sixty years of my literary life and are the ones readers have most enthusiastically responded to. I hope they will be welcomed by readers in English too.’
Jayasree Kalathil says, ‘Translating N. Prabhakaran is always a pleasure and an honour. I’m glad that our third collaboration is a selection of his short stories, a genre he has been perfecting throughout his writing career. These stories are a testament to his craft and his interest in revealing through his writing the range and depth of everyday contexts and emotions.’
Rahul Soni, Edior-at-Large, HarperCollins India, says, ‘When the manuscript of Diary of a Malayali Madman landed in my inbox in 2018, it was a revelation – and its publication introduced the English-reading world not only to the work of N. Prabhakaran, one of the most significant fiction writers in India, but also to Jayasree Kalathil, among the finest translators working today. It was no surprise when that dark, beautiful, fervid book went on to win the Crossword Book Award. It has been our privilege to continue to publish both Mr Prabhakaran and Jayasree ever since, and I’m excited for this careful selection of short stories, choosing from a lifetime of work and years in the making, to finally reach readers. This is an essential introduction to one of the country’s best writers – a writer’s writer, to use the cliché – and a must have for anyone interested in short stories and in Indian literature.’
***
EARLY PRAISE FOR A Fistful of Salt
‘N. Prabhakaran has the uncanny ability to turn bizarre incidents into stories that reveal the harsh realities of life. They are profoundly surreal, intensely melancholic and boldly exploratory narratives that cross the boundaries between the real and the imaginary. Jayasree Kalathil has done a brilliant job of retaining the essence of these stories.’ – Damodar Mauzo
‘Although he asks “Who needs a story in this day and age?”, N. Prabhakaran’s tales restore our sense of delight, not just in this literary form but in the crying human need for retrieving, remembering, retelling experience. He is both that wise storyteller of old, able to create wonder in the face of the functional, the utilitarian, the day-to-day, and a pained witness to faithless modern existence and its disenchanted men and women.’ – Anjum Hasan
‘At every moment, the characters in these stories feel the enormous pressure of what lies within them – illusions, fantasies, unfulfilled longing, false consciousness, and stories of the past that refuse to go away – which are as real to them as the world they live in with all its difficulties and challenges. Even as they must live with these inner realities and their own ruminations, these men – yes, they are nearly always men – navigate their circumstances and the puzzling nature of life itself in search of love, friendship, dignity, and even closure, resulting more often than not in heartbreak and tears. Vividly imagined and narrated with an unfailing tenderness, these stories extend our understanding of what it means to be human. Jayasree Kalathil’s pellucid translation illuminates and holds together the range of landscapes and the cast of vulnerable humans that make up this fascinating collection.’ – N. Kalyan Raman
***
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Parassinikkadavu in the Kannur district of Keralam in 1952, N. Prabhakaran taught Malayalam in several colleges before retiring as the head of the department from Brennen College, Thalassery. He has published nearly fifty works, including novels, poetry, plays, short story collections, essays, a travelogue, a children’s book, and a memoir in two parts, Njan Mathramallatha Njan and Ente Brennan Kaalam.
Prabhakaran won the Kendra Sahitya Akademi Award in 2025 for his novel Mayamanushyar. The novel also won the 2020 Odakkuzhal Award. His play Pulijanmam (co-translated with Jayasree Kalathil as Born to Be a Tiger) received the 1987 Kerala Sangeetha Nataka Akademi Award and the 1988 Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award. Another Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award followed, this time in the short story category, for Rathrimozhi. A recent collection of short stories, Oru Pidi Uppu, won the Deshabhimani Literary Award in 2026. Other accolades include the inaugural EMS Memorial Trust Award in 2005 for the novel Theeyoor Rekhakal; the Vaikom Muhammed Basheer Memorial Trust Award in 2009 for Thiranjedutha Kathakal; and the Malayattoor Award for the novel Janakatha in 2010. In 2022, Prabhakaran was honoured with the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Fellowship for lasting contributions to Malayalam literature.
In 2019, Jayasree Kalathil translated a collection of his novellas into English. The book, Diary of a Malayali Madman, published by HarperCollins India, won the Crossword Book Jury Award for Translation that year, and was shortlisted for the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Award. A North American edition was published by Deep Vellum in 2021. His novel Theeyoor Rekhakal was also translated by Jayasree Kalathil and published as Theeyoor Chronicles by HarperCollins India in 2021.
N. Prabhakaran lives in Dharmadam in Kannur district, Keralam.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Jayasree Kalathil is a bilingual writer and translator, and the author of The Sackclothman, a children’s book that has been translated into Malayalam, Telugu, Hindi and Urdu. Her translations have won the Crossword Book Award (twice), the JCB Prize for Literature, the V. Abdulla Memorial Translation Award, the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Award, and the Muse India–G.S.P. Rao Translation Prize Jury Commendation. Jayasree has also been shortlisted for the American Literary Translators Association’s National Translation Award in Prose. She has received the 2026 New India Foundation Translation Fellowship and the 2025 Camargo Foundation Fellowship, Cassis, France, and was the translator-in-residence at the British Centre for Literary Translation, University of East Anglia, UK, in 2023. Currently, she is the managing editor of translated fiction at The Bombay Literary Magazine, and a mentor on the ALTA Emerging Translators Mentorship Programme. She lives in the UK.
Paperback/Fiction/Translation/232pp/INR599
Releasing On 12th November
