By Vatya Raina

Jerry Pinto has worked across journalism, poetry, fiction and translation. In this essay, Vatya Raina looks at how his books ask readers to pay attention to people whose lives are often simplified or overlooked.

Writing about lives and cities

Among Pinto's books are Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb, a portrait of the film actor, and Em and the Big Hoom, a novel about a family living with a mother's mental illness. The latter received the 2016 Sahitya Akademi Award. Pinto has also written poetry and worked as a journalist.

Why the stories matter

Raina sees a writer who challenges easy assumptions about family, gender and public life. Instead of treating a person as a label, Pinto's work asks readers to look at the experiences behind it. That attention to voice and context is valuable in literary translation too: words carry more than a literal definition.

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