Kirin Narayan

Kirin Narayan (born November 1959) is an Indian-born American anthropologist and writer.

The daughter of Narayan Ramji Contractor, a South Asian civil engineer, and Didi Kinzinger, a German-American, she was born Kirin Contractor in Bombay and attended primary school in India and came to the United States in 1975. Narayan received a BA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and went on to post-graduate studies in anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, receiving her PhD in 1987. She taught at the Center for South Asia and Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.^[1][2][3] She is a reasearcher at the School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University.^[4] Narayan was named a Guggenheim Fellow in the field of anthropology and cultural studies in 1993.^[5]

In 1989, she published Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching; it received the Victor Turner Prize from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology^[6] and was co-winner of the Elsie Clews Prize for Folklore from the American Folklore Society.^[4] She was co-editor of Creativity/Anthropology (1993). In 1994, she published a novel Love, Stars and All That. Narayan published Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales in 1997. In 2007, she published a memoir My Family and Other Saints.^[2][3]

References

1. Nelson, Emmanuel Sampath (2000). Asian American Novelists: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. p. 257. ISBN 0313309116.
2. Sanga, Jaina C (2003). South Asian Novelists in English: An A-to-Z Guide. p. 186. ISBN 0313318859.
3. Encyclopedia of Asian-American Literature. 2015. pp. 556–57. ISBN 1438140584.
4. "Professor Kirin Narayan". Australian National University.
5. "Kirin Narayan". John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
6. "SHA Prize Winners". Society for Humanistic Anthropology.