Rema Menon

Rema Menon is an Indian Malayalam language writer and translator from Kerala. Her translation of The Alchemist into Malayalam was the first translation of that book into any of the Indian languages. For the translation of Khaled Hosseini's And the Mountains Echoed, she won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for Translation in 2017.

Biography Rema Menon was born in present-day Thrissur district of Kerala on September 10, 1944. Rema is the daughter of noted writer and former Kerala Sahitya Akademi president Puthezhath Raman Menon and Moothedathu Janaki Amma. Hails from Thrissur district of Kerala, she studied in a Malayalam medium school in Thrissur.

It was at that time that Rema Menon went to Thrissur to attend a program of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi. There, when she met Ravi DC, the editor of DC Books, she told him about the translation she had done. Interested in the plot, Ravi agreed to publish the book and subsequently purchased the copyright of 'The Alchemist' and published Malayalam translation of the book in 2000. 48 editions of The Malayalam Alchemist have been released so far. Notable books among them include translations of Afghan-American writer Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner (as Pattam Parathunnavar), A Thousand Splendid Suns (as Thilakkamarnna Ayiram Sooryanmar) and And the Mountains Echoed (as Parvathangalum Matolikollukunnu), translations of works such as Flight and Runners by Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, who won the Nobel Prize in 2018, Mao's Last Dancer by Chinese writer Li Cunxin, the Tibetan work Polo Mountain (Alay), Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, A Passage to India by E. M. Foster, Svetlana Alexievich's War's Unwomanly Face, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld's The Discomfort of Evening, Gandhiji's The Story of My Experiments with Truth, and spiritual works by many people such as the Dalai Lama, Swami Rama, Jaggi Vasudev, etc.

She is currently translating the South Korean novel A River in Darkness.

Awards and honors Rema Menon won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for Translation in 2017 for her book Parvathangalum Matolikollukunnu, the translation of Afghan-American novelist Khaled Hosseini's And the Mountains Echoed.