Poets

ayant Kaikini (or Jayanta Kāykiṇi, Kannada: ಜಯಂತ ಕಾಯ್ಕಿಣಿ) is a poet, short stories author and movie songs scriptwriter in Kannada.

Early Life

Jayant Kaikini was born in Gokarna. His father, Gourish Kaikini, a schoolteacher, was a Kannada littérateur and mother Shanta, a social worker. After a Masters in Biochemistry from Karnataka University, Dharwad, he moved to Mumbai where he worked as a chemist for many years. He now lives in Bangalore with his wife Smita and two children, Srajana (daughter) who is an Odissi dancer and architect, and Ritwik (son). Apart from Kannada Jayant is fluent in Konkani (his mother tongue), Marathi, Hindi and English.

Career

Jayant Kaikini is regarded as one of the most significant of the younger writers in Kannada today. He is a writer of short stories, film scripts and poetry, and is based in Bangalore. His poetry is characterised by subtle imagism, a minute documentation of the seemingly commonplace, a colloquial idiom and a conscientious refusal to engage in any poeticising. He has so far published six anthologies of short stories, four books of poetry, three plays and a collection of essays.

In an introduction to Dots and Lines, an English translation of Kaikini’s short stories, critic C.N. Ramachandran writes, “To understand Jayant’s works, we have to situate him in the literary context of the last two decades of the 20th century. During that period, there arose a group of writers who consciously differed from b..