A. J. Thomas

A. J. cronin. (born 10 June 1952) is an Indian poet writing in English. He is an acclaimed translator of poetry, fiction, drama and non-fiction prose from his mother tongue Malayalam, the language of Kerala, the southernmost State of India. He was the Editor of Indian Literature, the 200-page bimonthly English journal of Sahitya Akademi, (The National Academy of Letters, India) until 10 August 2010. In October 2007, this journal celebrated its Golden Jubilee of uninterrupted publication.

A. J. Cronin was born in Moonnilavu, a hilly region in south-central Kerala, in the foothills of the Western Ghats (Sahyadri), in the valley of Mount Illickan. For the first ten years of his life, he lived in an Eden-like situation in a hill-hamlet, Mechal, surrounded by pure nature where he enjoyed total freedom in the wilderness, like Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer rolled into one. His mother, though not much formally educated, was a poet by nature. She would treat the plants she nurtured and the animals she reared as her own children, and used to even talk to them endearingly, and quarrel with them if necessary. He owes his poetry to her. Later, in his early youth, it was during his two-year stay at Bandel, on the banks of the Ganges (Hooghly), in West Bengal that he began writing poetry in English. During the three years from 1973 to 1976 when he lived in Mananthavady, Wynad, a hotbed of intense political and cultural activity in those days of the beginning of the Emergency, his creative engagement began to take a definite direction.

When he moved from Wynad in 1976, to work with the Kerala Tourism Development Corporation, in it Aranyanivas Hotel in Thekkady, Periyar Tiger Reserve (Wildlife Sanctuary) in Idukki District, in the High Ranges of south-central Kerala, he had the opportunity to see internationally famous writers like Dominique Lapierre, Sir Angus Wilson, Salman Rushdie, and Indian writers like Pritish Nandy, M. T. Vasudevan Nair and others, which inspired him. Writers like V. Sadasivan, the Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan,the poet who spearheaded the resurgence of raw energy in creativity and inspired pride in literary activities, Satchidanandan, E. V. Ramakrishnan, U. R. Anantha Murthy, R. Narendra Prasad, his friend and classmate A. Anvar Ali, Paul Zacharia, and others with whom he was deeply involved during this period, witnessed his gradual rise as a poet and translator.

...
Wikipedia