Narayan won numerous awards during the course of his literary career. His first major award was in 1958, the Sahitya Akademi Award for The Guide. When the book was made into a film, he received the Filmfare Award for the best story. In 1964, he received the Padma Bhushan during the Republic Day honours. In 1980, he was awarded the AC Benson Medal by the (British) Royal Society of Literature, of which he was an honorary member. In 1982 he was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature multiple times, but never won the honour.
Born to a schoolteacher father, he took the name R. K. Narayan at the suggestion of his close friend and another great author, Graham Greene. He learnt Tamil and English in school. He did his initial studies at the residence of his grandmother and eventually moved to Mysore with his parents, when his father got appointed as headmaster of the Maharaja’s High School in Mysore.
R. K. Narayan earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Mysore and went to the United States in 1956 at the invitation of the Rockefeller Foundation. His literary career began with his short stories, which appeared in ‘The Hindu’ newspaper. He began to work as the Mysore correspondent of ‘Justice’, a Madras-based newspaper. When he could not get his first novel ‘Swami and Friends’ published, a mutual friend showed the draft to Graham Greene who agreed to arrange for its publication.
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