Manu Bhattathiri is the author of ''Savithri’s Special Room and Other Stories'' and ''The Town That Laughed.'' He is also the co-founder of Cheers! Communications, an

advertising agency An advertising agency, often referred to as a creative agency or an ad agency, is a business dedicated to creating, planning, and handling advertising and sometimes other forms of promotion and marketing for its clients. An ad agency is generally ...

based out of

Bengaluru Bangalore (), officially Bengaluru (), is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Karnataka. It has a population of more than and a metropolitan population of around , making it the third most populous city and fifth most ...

, India. ''The Town That Laughed'' has been listed by

The Hindu ''The Hindu'' is an Indian English-language daily newspaper owned by The Hindu Group, headquartered in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. It began as a weekly in 1878 and became a daily in 1889. It is one of the Indian newspapers of record and the secon ...

as one of the top 10 books (fiction) of 2018.

Works

The fictional town of Karuthupuzha is the setting for both of Manu Bhattathiri's works, ''Savithri's Special Room'' and ''The Town That Laughed''. According to Bhattathiri, "it (Karuthupuzha) has enough violently funny, emotionally intense and beautifully imperfect people to write many stories about." The Hindu's review of ''The Town That Laughed'' has this to say: "Where the author truly excels, however, is in his characterisation." His style of writing, especially the setting of his stories in a small town, has been repeatedly compared to RK Narayan's

Malgudi Malgudi is a fictional town located in Agumbe in Karnataka in the novels and short stories of R. K. Narayan. It forms the setting for most of Narayan's works. Starting with his first novel, ''Swami and Friends'', all but one of his fifteen nov ...

by The Hindu,

the New Indian Express ''The New Indian Express'' is an Indian English-language broadsheet daily newspaper published by the Chennai-based Express Publications. It was founded in 1932 as ''The Indian Express'', under the ownership of Chennai-based P. Varadarajulu Naid ...

, and

the Hindustan Times ''Hindustan Times'' is an Indian English-language daily newspaper based in Delhi. It is the flagship publication of HT Media, an entity controlled by the KK Birla family, and is owned by Shobhana Bhartia. It was founded by Sunder Singh Lyall ...

. ''Savithri's Special Room and Other Stories'' has been published by

HarperCollins HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News Cor ...

while T''he Town That Laughed'' has been published by the

Aleph Book Company Aleph Book Company is an Indian publishing company. It was founded in May 2011 by David Davidar, a novelist, publisher and former president of Penguin Books Canada, in association with R. K. Mehra and Kapish Mehra of Rupa Publications. The he ...

. ''Savithri's Special Room and Other Stories'' was on the shortlist of the Crossword Book Jury Award. ''The Town That Laughed'' has been listed by

as one of the top 10 books (fiction) of 2018. Bhattathiri's latest book ''The Oracle of Karuthupuzha'' was published by Aleph Book Company on 10 April 2021.

References

Living people Indian writers Year of birth missing (living people) {{India-writer-stub