The writer Gourahari Das can be called a traveller. His journeys, both figurative and literal, have made a writer of him. Born in 1959 in a very remote Indian village Sandhagara near river Mantei he has come a long way. Real-life experiences acquired while growing up in an impoverished monastery sharpened his skills as a writer and endowed him with a sensibility laced with compassion and humour which gives his creative being its distinctive character.
A front-liner among Indian authors writing in Odia, Gourahari is not only a fictionist, playwright, critic and poet but a Media-academician and a leading journalist to lend his writings the benefits of a rich artistic sensibility in their rare depth, dimension and diverse pictures of life in more than 70 books besides the regular features and columns in the Sambad and Katha, the largest circulated Daily and the fiction monthly of Odisha respectively.
Born in a freedom-fighter family Gourahari had to live amid the strict discipline and austerities of an impoverished monastery where he got the first lessons of life while getting the formal primary education. Notwithstanding the nagging circumstantial cul-de-sacs Gourahari, supported by some scholarships, marched ahead on the way of his quest for knowledge; he graduated from Ravenshaw College the oldest and the premier alma mater of Odisha. It is there he, at the age of 21 got the readers’ first applause for his Juara Bhatta (The Web and Tide), a collection of short stories. Since that Gourahari has not looked back. He acquired a Post-graduate and a Ph.D degree from Utkal University besides being the Gold Medalist in MJMC.
