Sudha Murty: an engineer who writes simple stories

A girl who wanted wings to reach the library

Sudha Murty was born in 1950 in Shiggaon, a small town in north Karnataka. She spent part of her childhood with her maternal grandmother, and she has said that her grandparents told her many of the stories she later retold for children.

Books were special in her home. She told Gulf News that until she graduated, books were the only gifts her family gave her. As a child, she once told her grandfather that if she had a pair of wings, she would fly to the nearest library.

She studied in a Kannada-medium school up to Class 10 and became comfortable in English only in her teens. When she went to engineering college, where classes were taught in English, she found the lessons hard to follow at first. She still did very well, and later passed both her graduation and her master's with gold medals.

“Sensitivity helps you write better.”

— Sudha Murty, via Gulf News

One postcard that opened a door

After her engineering degree, she joined the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore for a master's in computer science. One day she saw a job advertisement from TELCO, the company now called Tata Motors, on the notice board. It said women candidates need not apply.

She already had a scholarship to study in the United States and was not looking for a job. But she felt the line was unfair, and she wrote a postcard to the chairman, J. R. D. Tata, to say so. Within about ten days, TELCO sent her a telegram inviting her for an interview in Pune and offered to pay her travel costs. She got the job and became the company's first woman engineer.

In Pune she met N. R. Narayana Murthy, whom she later married. When he wanted to start his own software company, she gave him 10,000 rupees from her savings. That company became Infosys. In 1996 she started the Infosys Foundation, a charity that supports schools, hospitals, libraries and other public work.

Writing in Kannada first, English after 50

Her first novel was published in Kannada, her mother tongue, in 1979, when she was 29. For more than twenty years after that, she wrote mainly in Kannada.

She did not think her English was good enough for books. It was the journalist T. J. S. George, then a senior editor at the Indian Express, who encouraged her to write in English. Her first English book came out after she turned 50. Wise and Otherwise became one of her best-known English titles.

Many more followed, including How I Taught My Grandmother to Read, Dollar Bahu, Grandma's Bag of Stories and Three Thousand Stitches. The title story of How I Taught My Grandmother to Read grew out of her own childhood with her grandmother, and it has been translated into more than 15 languages.

A writer read across India

According to her publisher, Penguin, she has written more than 300 titles in English and Kannada. Her books have been translated into all the major Indian languages and have sold more than 60 lakh copies.

Her honours include the Padma Shri and the R. K. Narayan Award for literature in 2006, and the Padma Bhushan and the Sahitya Akademi's Bal Sahitya Puraskar for children's writing in 2023. On 8 March 2024, President Droupadi Murmu nominated her to the Rajya Sabha.

Much of her material comes from everyday life. Her travels and her work with the Infosys Foundation gave her many of the people and incidents that appear in her stories.

The skills and habits that made the difference

She collects stories from life. She told Gulf News that when she comes across something interesting, she keeps it in her memory and lets it grow. For a novel, she may think about the characters for years, but the actual writing then takes her about 20 days.

She keeps it simple. A review in The Book Review notes that her children's stories have little description and few long conversations, so the plot keeps moving. She talks to young readers at their level, like a friend, instead of preaching.

She shows values instead of lecturing. In her stories, unkind or greedy characters change because of what happens to them, so the lesson comes through the story itself.

She asks her readers. The same review reports that she shares her drafts with children for honest feedback before sending them to publishers, and changes them based on what they say.