Raja Rao (1909-2006), a path-breaker of Indian writing in English, was born in Hassan, Mysore. After he graduated from Madras University, he went on to the University of Montpellier in France on a scholarship. He moved to the United States in 1966, where he taught at the University of Texas at Austin until 1983, when he retired as emeritus professor. A powerful and profound writer and a superb stylist, Rao successfully and imaginatively appropriated English for the Indian narrative. He was honoured with India's second-highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan, in 2007, the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1964 and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1988.
R. Parthasarathy is a poet and translator. The author of the long poem 'Rough Passage', he edited the influential anthology Ten Twentieth- Century Indian Poets. His translation of the fifth-century Tamil epic, the Cilappatika¯ram, was awarded the 1995 Sahitya Akademi Award. He is a professor emeritus of English and Asian studies at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. He was Raja Rao's editor from 1974 to 1998.
