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Author Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayan died at a private hospital in Madras at 0305 hours IST on Sunday. He was 95.
Narayan, one of India's first and most celebrated novelists in English, had been admitted to hospital on April 27 following cardiovascular problems.
He is survived by his brother, cartoonist R K Laxman, son-in-law C S Chandrasekharan and two grandchildren. Narayan's wife died some years ago.
Narayan achieved lasting fame as the creator of the fictional town of Malgudi, 'somewhere in South India', and the character of the boy Swami, whose antics were the subject of his first novel, Swami And Friends, which was a great success.
His simple yet elegant style of writing, laced with gentle humour, won him a large fan following. He wrote 34 novels, including such all-time favourites as The Bachelor of Arts, The Man-eater of Malgudi, The Financial Expert and Malgudi Days. Swami And Friends and Malgudi Days were made into a highly successful television series in the eighties by the late Kannada film-maker Shankar Nag. Another of Narayan's hit novels, The Guide, was made into a successful Hindi film by Dev Anand's Navketan Films in 1962.
Born in Madras in 1906, Narayan was educated in Madras and later Mysore, the town that many felt his fictional Malgudi was most closely modelled on. After completing his education in 1930, he worked as a teacher and a journalist for a while before taking up writing as his profession. His first novel appeared in 1935. Most of his works were translated into European languages and Hebrew.
Narayan was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1964. He also won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1958 for The Guide.
A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Narayan become a Member of the Rajya Sabha for a six-year term in 1989.
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