Grun-tu-molani

Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in Leeds, to Sri Lankan Tamils. His first book of poems, Grun-tu-molani (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. His second, The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here (Bloodaxe Books, 2019) won a Northern Writers Award and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was shortlisted for both the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection and for the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize. After teaching at the universities of Cambridge, Durham and Birmingham in the UK, he now teaches at Harvard in the US. He is the author of Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic (Bucknell, 2015), winner of both the University English Prize and the Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism. On top of his academic work, he writes literary journalism, and is represented as an author of fiction by the Wylie Agency.

'Gripping is not a word you usually associate with poetry, but Vidyan Ravinthiran's poems are precisely that, and they seldom let go. They are full of surprising turns (and turns of phrase), and their humour can make you squirm, as humour should, the assonance and internal rhymes and puns adding a further twist to the funny knife as it tickles the funny bone. A ferocious intelligence is at work in these poems, whose stylish armoured exterior reflects sometimes a literary scholar and sometimes a displaced person; sometimes contemporary Britain and sometimes ancient Sri Lanka. Ravinthiran is set to enrich English poetry, just as, in an earlier generation, Gamini Salgado enriched its prose' - Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. 'Vidyan Ravinthiran's poems are a heady mixture of exotic language and strangely real personal experience.The poet's reflective stare takes in with ease different worlds, all cemented together by a verbal wit and a winning, amused half-mockery. They are a delight' - Bernard O'Donoghue.