Description: Avadhoot Dongare is a young promising Marathi novelist. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar, 2014, for Svatahala Faltu Samjanyachi Goshta (The Story of Being Useless). He has a phenomenally different way of telling a story. Once he starts telling the story, he moves out of the picture. The characters start behaving independently.
Brief description: AVADHOOT DONGARE started writing fiction in 2007. He has published four novels in Marathi: Svatahala Faltu Samjanyachi Goshta (The Story of Being Useless, 2012), Eka Lekhakache Teen Sandarbha (Three Contexts of a Writer, 2013), Paan, Pani Ni Pravah (Leaf, Water and Flow, 2015), and Bhintivarcha Chashma (Specs on the Wall, 2018). The first novel was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar in 2014. He has also published a critical essay Svatahacha Avakash Tapasatana (Probing One's Space, 2017) about one of the translations he had done as a professional and a book of short stories for children. He blogs at ekregh.blogspot.in.
Review Quotes:
'The two novellas - The Story of Being Useless and Three Contexts of a Writer - are also about the act of writing novels. What the novelist writes is not true or false. It goes beyond this. The characters, events taking place in the novel are the creation of the novelist. However, they are entwined with real events. Reality and the writer's perspective merge. Avadhoot Dongare expresses our reality, the politics of living in our times through the stories of ordinary lives. His narration is simple, but subtle.
'These excellent translations, by Nadeem Khan, are a need of the times, enabling the stories to reach out to the world.'
VASANT ABAJI DAHAKE, Poet and Critic
'Avadhoot Dongare's Svatahala Faltu Samjanyachi Goshta (The Story of Being Useless) reflects the consciousness of the youth in our contemporary society and the isolation and loneliness which has come to engulf them. The experiences of the youth assume new structural element in the novel and reveal the contradictory pulls driving attitudes of the new generation. The novel is unique in its stylistic exercise.'
from the Sahitya Akademi citation
'Dongare's novels needed to be translated urgently. It is a good sign for the creation of a healthy atmosphere for translation of Marathi literature.'
Loksatta, 18 May 2019
'This compilation of novellas introduces readers of English to a fresh literary voice, but there is even more reason to celebrate this translation project born in Amravati -- away from the hub and spokes of mainstream publishing industry.'
Pune Mirror, 23 May 2019