Kirin Narayan

Narayan is the daughter of Narayan Ramji Contractor, a civil engineer from Nashik, and Didi Kinzinger, a German-American "artist, decorator, and builder of sustainable housing".[1] Narayan was born in Bombay, attended school in India and came to the United States in 1976.[2]

Narayan received a BA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and went on to post-graduate studies in anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, receiving her PhD in 1987. She taught anthropology and South Asian studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.[1][3][4] In 1993 she was named a Guggenheim Fellow in the field of anthropology and cultural studies.[5] She is a professor in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University.[6]

In 1989, Narayan published Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching.[7] It received the Victor Turner Prize from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology[8] and was co-winner of the Elsie Clews Prize for Folklore from the American Folklore Society.[6]

In 1994, she published the novel Love, Stars and All That.[9] Reviewing the novel, Indian poet and editor Dom Moraes praised the work, saying:

“This is a novel well received and achieved: it is also intelligent, excellently written, and revelatory of what it is like to be an American born in India. It makes one feel Narayan is that very rare bird, a born writer, and that she may fly far.”[10]

Narayan published Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales in 1997.[11] In 2002 a new edition of the first collection of Indian folk tales in English, Mary Frere's Old Deccan Days, was published with an introduction by Narayan.[12] In 2007, she published a memoir My Family and Other Saints.[3][4][13] An autobiographical work in which "Gods, gurus and eccentric relatives compete for primacy", The New York Times described the work as an "enchanting memoir".[14] Its title is a reference to Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, a childhood inspiration to Narayan.[15]

In her 2012 work Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov,[16] Narayan used Anton Chekhov's Sakhalin Island as inspiration for an exploration of ethnographic writing. James Wood, writing of his 'Books of the Year' in The New Yorker, described it as a "brief and brilliant book" that he read "with huge pleasure".[17] In 2016 Narayan published Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses in the Himalayan Foothills, about women's traditions of singing in the Kangra Valley.[18]

• Kirin Narayan publications indexed by Google Scholar
• Photo of Narayan as an infant with her mother, part of a 1960 photo-essay "East-West wife" by Marilyn Silverstone in Coronet magazine