Penguin presents The Gospel of Yudas by K.R. Meera and translated by Rajesh Rajamohan. K.R. Meera won the Sahitya Akademi Award for her literary masterpiece Hangwoman and her latest The Gospel of Yudas is set in Kerala in the wake of the Emergency and is a heartrending story with deeply nuanced characters. Young and impressionable, Prema is deeply infatuated with Yudas, the enigmatic man who dredges corpses from the bottom of the nearby lake. Longing to be rescued from the tyranny of her father, a former policeman who zealously tortured Naxalite rebels during the Emergency, Prema dreams of escape and finds herself drawn to the Naxal political ideology. Convinced that Yudas was one of the inmates at her father’s prison camp, Prema believes that only he can save her. But Yudas is haunted by secrets of his own, and like his biblical namesake Judas Iscariot, he bears the burden of crushing guilt.
Ferociously powerful and utterly absorbing, The Gospel of Yudas raises alarmingly relevant questions about the politics of allegiance and the price of idealism. It is also a deeply human story about remorse, redemption and love.
The Author:
K.R. Meera is a multi-award-winning writer and journalist. She has published short stories, novels and essays, and has won some of the most prestigious literary prizes including the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award, the Vayalar Award and the Odakkuzhal Award. Most recently, she won the Kendra Sahitya Akademi Award for Aarachar, widely hailed as a contemporary classic and published by Penguin Books India as Hangwoman. She lives in Kottayam with her husband, Dileep, and daughter, Shruthi.
The Translator:
Rajesh Rajamohan is a translator and IT professional. His translation of N.S. Madhavan’s Litanies of Dutch Battery won the Vodafone- Crossword Prize for Best Translated Fiction in 2011, and was shortlisted for The Hindu Literary Prize and longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. His other translations include Karmayogi, the widely acclaimed biography of E. Sreedharan. Rajesh lives in Pennsylvania, USA, with his family.