Kiran Nagarkar (1942–2019) was a novelist, playwright and screenwriter who wrote in both Marathi and English, bringing the life of Mumbai, reworked mythology and sharp social criticism into fiction that was satirical, irreverent and formally daring. Born in Bombay on 2 April 1942, he studied in Marathi until the fourth standard and then in English, took his B.A. at Fergusson College, Pune, in 1964 and an M.A. in English from the University of Mumbai in 1967, and worked in teaching, advertising and journalism.
His first Marathi story, Toh, led to the novel Saat Sakkam Trechalis (1974), a modernist collage of seven lives across forty-three years that was hailed as a landmark for reinventing the language of Marathi fiction, even as its boldness unsettled readers. It appeared in English as Seven Sixes Are Forty-Three in 1995. His play Bedtime Story, an irreverent retelling of the Mahabharata written around 1977, ran into censorship during the Emergency and a seventeen-year ban on performance.
Writing in English from the 1990s, he published Ravan and Eddie (1994), Cuckold (1997), which won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2000, God's Little Soldier (2006) and The Extras (2012). Germany awarded him its Order of Merit in 2012 for carrying Indian literature to readers abroad. He died on 5 September 2019.
