Kamal Desai (1928–2011) was a Marathi novelist and short-story writer whose small body of work is among the most intense fiction of the generation after Mardhekar. Born on 10 November 1928 in Yamkan Mardi, a village in Belgaum district, she took her first degree in Belgaum and her M.A. in Marathi literature from Bombay University, winning a gold medal at each, then taught Marathi at colleges across Maharashtra.
She began writing short stories in 1955. Her first collection, Rang (1962), drew on middle-class lives along the Maharashtra–Karnataka border, and Rang-2 followed in 1998. Her three novels are Ratrandin Amha Yuddhacha Prasang (1963), Kala Surya, serialised in Satyakatha in 1968 and published as a book in 1975, in which Meera rebels against a small town's patriarchal traditions, and Hat Ghalnari Bai (1975), the story of a woman's search for identity and autonomy in urban India, widely regarded as her finest work and published in English as The Woman Who Wore a Hat in 2013. A selection of her fiction appeared in 2010 as Kalya Suryakhalchya Goshti : Nivadak Kamal Desai.
Her fiction gives Marathi literature a rare female perspective, following women who struggle against destiny and silence towards their own selves, through non-linear structures, symbolic imagery and myth recast in the present. She died on 17 June 2011.
