ISSUE DATE: May 24, 2021 UPDATED: May 14, 2021 18:02 IST Novelist V. Annamalai a.k.a. Imayam The novelist V. Annamalai (Imayam) wears his Dravidian heritage with pride, but he has also always rebelled against the idea of a Dravidian or Dalit literature. “When you write, it’s literature, but when I write, it’s Dalit literature?” he has famously demanded. Sellatha Panam, the novel for which he won the 2020 Sahitya Akademi Award in Tamil, is about love that turned to hate, and the woman dying in a burns ward because of it. His unflinching novella about honour killing, Pethavan (available in English as The Begetter), was based on the particular case of a woman, or, if you like, on the many cases that occur daily in India whenever two people marry across caste divisions.