Bio

The child of Sri Lankan Tamil immigrants, Vidyan Ravinthiran grew up in a mixed area of Leeds (in the North of England), studied at Oxford and Cambridge, and is now an Associate Professor of English Literature at Harvard. He's  the author of two books of poems: Grun-tu-molani (Bloodaxe, 2014) and The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here (2019), which won a Northern Writers Award, was a PBS Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the Forward and the T.S. Eliot Prizes. 

Vidyan's first monograph, Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic (Bucknell UP, 2015) won both the University English Prize and the Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism; his next, on Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. He has also put together editions of Indian poets, and published a range of both scholarly and journalistic articles on the cognitions of form in both poetry and prose from multiple time-periods and nations.

For several years an editor at Prac Crit, he has also served as a Poetry Book Society Selector, and is, with Sandeep Parmar and Sarah Howe, a co-organiser of Ledbury Emerging Critics, a UK/US scheme for increasing racial diversity in review-culture.  As of May 2020, he lives in Acton, MA with his son Frank (pictured!) and his wife Jenny Holden, who writes fiction.