About the author
Chaso (Chaganti Somayajulu) was born in Srikakulam, in northern coastal Andhra Pradesh, in 1915 and lived most of his life in the vibrant literary and cultural centre of Vizianagaram. He began publishing exquisitely crafted short stories in Telugu in the early 1940s. Although he (wrongly) considered himself a Marxist writer and was one of the founders of the Abhyudaya Racayitala Sangham, the Progressive Writers? Association, he was in fact a maverick individualist, closely attuned to the experience and distinctive language of people from all walks of life and the whole spectrum of society. His short stories, a compact corpus of hard-hitting, understated, lyrical works, constitute one of the high points of twentieth-century Telugu literature. Chaso died in 1994.
