– Mohammed Atherulla Shariff
Bengaluru: Dadapeer Jyman is a young Muslim Kannada writer from a specific marginalised subgroup, part of the Queer Poets Collective, who has moved from a small village in Bellary district to the growing mega polis of Bengaluru. He is poet, writer, translator and a member of the Queer Poets Collective.
He holds a Master’s degree in Mathematics from Karnataka University, Dharwad. Literature, theatre and cinema are his fields of interest. His poems and short stories have been published in the leading Kannada newspapers and periodicals.
Jyman’s visibility as a writer shot to the next level when his collection of short stories, Neelakurinji, Vaishnavi Prakashan, 2021, won the 2022 National Sahitya Akademi Young Litterateur Prize for Kannada, 2021 Masti Venkatesh Iyengar Book Prize, one of the highest awards for Kannada literature, and was among the youngest, at 29, to receive the prize, and the Rajyotsava award from Gulbarga University. His collection is part of the Gulbarga University syllabus for the BA degree.
He wrote a regular column ‘Junction Point’ for Kendasampige, an online magazine for Kannada literature. He recently won the TOTO Awards 2023 for creative writing in Kannada. His translation from English into Kannada, published by Chanda Pustaka in 2021, of Purdah and Polygamy: Life in an Indian Muslim Household by Iqbalunnisa Hussain, originally published in 1944 by Hosali Press, Bangalore, was awarded Kuvempu Bhasha Bharati Prize that recognises the best translations from any language into Kannada. He has also translated into Kannada, the English translation of the German play Barren Land (Brachland) by Swiss playwright, Dmitrij Gawrisch.
Very few outside the Kannada reading world are aware of what his work is about.
