By IANS,
Chennai : Rokkiah Malik who writes under the pseudonym Salma is one of the eleven Indian authors contending for this year’s Man Asia Literary Prize with her book “Midnight Tales”
Rokkiah, who is a top official of the Tamil Nadu welfare department, was first published in the late ’90s. She caught public imagination with her feminist poetry collections like “Oru Maalaiyum Innoru Maalaiyum” and “Pachai Thevathai”.
She wrote her first novel in 2004. That same year she won the Katha award with her story, “Izhappu”.
The publishing house Zuban published her Man Asia nominated title, “Midnight Tales”, in English.
Malik comes from a conservative Tamil Muslim family near Tiruchirapally and is the mother of two. Her writing reflects the stories of women in her socio-cultural milieu.
She was a local panchayat chief and and a DMK candidate for a assembly seat in 2006.
From Man Asia site:
Born in 1968 in Tamil Nadu, Salma’s first poetry collection shocked conservative society where women are supposed to remain silent. In 2003, Salma and three other Tamil women poets faced obscenity charges and violent threats. Salma is now head of the panchayat (local level government body) of Thuvarankurichi, near Trichi in Tamil Nadu. The government of Tamil Nadu has appointed her Chairperson of the Tamil Nadu Social Welfare Board.
Midnight Tales focuses on the inner world of Muslim women in the conservative society of Tamil Nadu in south India. This is a world in which women remain within the home, in purdah, while their men occupy the space of the outside world. There is much in these different households that goes on in the hours before dawn, when women wake up to a world as yet absented by men, and where they share thoughts, lives, joys and sorrows.