MANGALORE: With a boyish smile and a casual-looking attitude, Arun Kumar Pallathadka looks like a boy next-door. A student of second year BA (geo-informatics) in Maharaja College in Mysore, Arun Kumar, from Badiyadka in Kerala, is the youngest writer of novella genre (a written, fictional, prose narrative longer than a novelette, but shorter than a novel) in India.
His first Novella Life - a whirlwind published by Latin America-based Winter Bloom publications has already sold over one lakh copies in the international market. It is now in its third edition with a print order of 2.5 lakh copies.
Without basking in the glory of his debut novella, Arun Kumar is already working on seven manuscripts. “Three of them have just completed,” he told Express while in Mangalore, en route his home in Kasargod.
Kumar did his schooling in Pallathadka AUP School and Badiyadka Navajeevana High School in Kannada medium and took to writing short stories in English in high school in order to over come his fear of the language.
There was no looking back after Arun Kumar won a gold medal for securing first place in national-level scientific writing in English. Life -- a whirlwind, about an adopted boy tracing his biological family, is not biographical and is likely to have been influenced by reports of adopted children from foreign countries being reunited with their biological parents in India. Unlike other fictional writers from India, he has not restricted the premises of the plot to India.
His passion for geography has helped him to be true to details while basing his premises in foreign countries.