Janaki Srinivasa Murthy

Born: 12 February 1945

She is popularly known by her nickname Vaidehi is an Indian writer and well-known writer of modern Kannada language fiction.
She is one of the most successful women writers in the language and a recipient of prestigious national and state-level literary awards.
She has won the Sahitya Akademi Award for her collection of short stories, Krauncha Pakshigalu in 2009.
She grew up in a large traditional Brahmin family.
She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Commerce from the Bhandarkar College in Kundapura.
Her father is a lawyer and her mother was a homemaker.
At home, a dialect of Kannada called Kundapur Kannada is spoken and she uses this dialect in her works as well.
She became her pen-name under unusual circumstances.
Early in her writing career, she had sent a story to the Kannada weekly magazine Sudha for publication but later requested the publisher not to go ahead with the print as the story was non-fictional and included a real-life story.
However, the editor went ahead with the publication by changing the author’s name to ‘Vaidehi’.
This name stuck in her later writings as well as she gained popularity.