M. Ramalingam is a Tamil

Tamil language

Tamil is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamil people of the Indian subcontinent. It has official status in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and in the Indian union territory of Pondicherry. Tamil is also an official language of Sri Lanka and Singapore...

, literary critic, and translator from Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu is one of the 28 states of India. Its capital and largest city is Chennai. Tamil Nadu lies in the southernmost part of the Indian Peninsula and is bordered by the union territory of Pondicherry, and the states of Kerala, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh...

, India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

.

Biography

Ramalingam was born in Thiruthuraipoondi

Thiruthuraipoondi

Thiruthuraipoondi is a city and a municipality in Thiruvarur district in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Thiruthuraipoondi is 330 km south of Chennai, 40 km west of Nagappattinam and 65 km east of Thanjavur.- Geography :...

, Thanjavur District

Thanjavur District

Thanjavur District is one of the 32 districts of the state of Tamil Nadu, in southeastern India. Its headquarters is Thanjavur.-Geography:...

. He joined the Tamil Nadu Educational Service in 1964 and later became
Professor and Head of the Tamil department at Government Arts College, Kumbakonam

Kumbakonam

Kumbakonam , also spelt as Coombaconum in the records of British India , is a town and a special grade municipality in the Thanjavur district in the southeast Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Located 40 kilometres from Thanjavur and 272 kilometres from Chennai, it is the headquarters of the Kumbakonam...

. He has written seven volumes of literary criticism. In 1981, he was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award

Sahitya Akademi Award

Sahitya Akademi Award is a literary honor in India which Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters, annually confers on writers of outstanding works in one of the following twenty-four major Indian languagesAssamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri,...

 for Tamil for his critical work on modern Tamil prose Pudhiya Urai Nadai (lit. The New Prose).