- Lived:
- born 15 October 1966, Kootapalli village near Tiruchengode, Tamil Nadu → the Kongu country of the western Tamil plains (Namakkal, Salem), with an unwanted exile in Chennai; living and writing, verified as of September 2026
- Field:
- Tamil fiction — novelist, poet and professor of Tamil; the chronicler of the Kongu farming world; centre of modern India's defining battle over a writer's freedom
- The Big Idea:
- A quiet novel about a childless couple was attacked four years after it appeared, its author forced to apologize and to declare his writing self dead — until a court ruled that the Constitution protects the artist and ordered the state to do the same. The mob got an apology; the law gave it back.
- In their words:
- "Perumal Murugan the writer is dead… Leave him alone." (his public declaration, January 2015 — reversed, on his own terms, after the court's one-word instruction to him: "Write.")
- If you remember one thing:
- India nearly lost one of its finest living novelists to organized outrage over a book that, by many reports, few of the protesters had read — and got him back because two judges said the answer to a book you dislike is to put it down, not to silence the person who wrote it.