R. K. Narayan

Narayan grew up shuttling between his grandmother's house in Madras and his father's school postings, an indifferent student who failed his university entrance exam once before scraping through. He worked briefly as a teacher and journalist before deciding, against his family's wishes, to support himself entirely by writing fiction, a precarious choice in 1930s colonial India.

His first novel struggled to find a publisher until his college friend Graham Greene championed the manuscript in London, launching a decades-long friendship and Narayan's steady stream of Malgudi novels and stories. The Guide, later adapted into a hit Hindi film, follows a tour guide and small-time swindler mistaken for a holy man who grows, almost against his will, into the part.

He wrote in a plain, unhurried English distinct from the more ornate postcolonial style that followed him, publishing into his nineties before dying in Chennai in 2001, Malgudi's population still growing on the page.