Mati Matala

Mati Matala, published in 1964, is a classic in Odia language and received the prestigious Jnanapith award in 1974, the first book from Odisha to have been bestowed with this honour.  The book portrays vividly the rural life of Odisha and  its socio-political transformation in the post-independence period. The inter-personal relationships between the characters is deftly and very subtly depicted in this massive novel of epic dimensions, running almost into 1000 pages and the writer took more than 10 years to complete this work, which was an experiment in itself, in order to probe his own mind as it goes through transformations over a time period. The book has been translated into Hindi and Bengali.