M. K. Raghavendra
Indian film critic (b. 1954)
M. K. Raghavendra (born 24 December 1954) is an Indian film and literary scholar, critic, and writer. He has written eleven books on cinema, literature, and politics and contributed to major publications like The Hindu and The Indian Express. He received the National Award for Best Film Critic in 1997 and the Homi Bhabha Fellowship in 2000. His book Seduced by the Familiar (2008) is highly regarded in the field. Raghavendra has lectured at top Indian universities and served on international film juries. He is also the Founder-Editor of Phalanx, an online journal for debates in the humanities and social sciences.
Early writing
Raghavendra, who has a master's degree in science and worked for over two decades in the financial sector, first attracted attention as a film critic when he became co-founder of the film journal Deep Focus, the other co-founders being AL Georgekutty, MU Jayadev and Babu Subramanian, who all wrote their first critical pieces on cinema for the journal around 1987–88. With AL Georgekutty as editor, Deep Focus was launched in December 1987 and made an immediate impact for the seriousness of its approach. The journal began as a quarterly but became irregular thereafter, sometimes coming out with only a single issue in an entire year. But Raghavendra was especially prolific in Deep Focus with his essays and reviews.
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This entry incorporates text from “M. K. Raghavendra” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.