Kamala Das (Madhavikutty, Kamala Suraiya), died this morning, May 31, 2009, aged 75.

Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own (1929):

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved.”

In an interview in 1996, the interviewer Shobha Warrier reminds Das of something she had once said “about the pathetic condition of a woman writer who does not even have a writing table. The dining table has to serve as her writing table once it is cleared.”
Kamala Das replies:

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