Links and reviews
Vidyan's poetry can be read online at The Guardian, The Nation, The London Review of Books, Poetry London and Poetry magazine (there are also links here to several essays); here are some video readings for the BBC, the T.S Eliot Prize (click for Youtube results) and the Forward Prize. Here's Prac Crit, the online magazine of poetry and poetics he edited with Sarah Howe and Dai George.
Avidya:
'Vidyan Ravinthiran's Avidya is a deeply moving, relevant, necessary collection of poems that meditates on identity and belonging. A fusion of Sri Lankan culture, Englishness, whatever that has come to mean in this moment and in context of this book, and the questions that it asks about what it is to speak English are profoundly relevant and timely given the political situation in terms of the rise of the far right, and what is happening in terms of xenophobic ideas of who belongs and who doesn't. I found this profoundly moving to read. It touched me deeply.' – Rommi Smith, Co-Judge of the Forward Prizes 2025
‘As one of the judges for the 2025 Forward Prizes, I’ve had a full-on year of reading poetry collections. The variety of entries was wonderful and it was quite a journey through the wild ecosystem of contemporary poetry. For the first time ever – and recognising the need for cultural collegiality and new value systems – the main prize for best collection was shared by two writers: Karen Solie for Wellwater (Picador) and Vidyan Ravinthiran for Avidya (Bloodaxe). The former tackles environmental breakdown, corporate control, inheritance and family; the latter migration, war, mythology and belonging. Both are lyrical, humorous, astute and beautiful. Where politics obfuscates and fails to tackle issues honestly, poems are often far deadlier, more truthful and exacting. I can’t think of two more artful commentaries on today’s world or two more inviting entryways into modern poetry.’ – Sarah Hall, The New Statesman (Books of the Year 2025)
'Avidya shared the Forward prize for best collection this year (with Karen Solie’s Wellwater), and the only surprise was the sharing. Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in Leeds to Sri Lankan Tamil parents and he explores two worlds and two languages. [...] Avidya deals with political violence: Sri Lanka “a teardrop on the map” where “the pen is a torn-out tooth”. The collection traces difficult histories, personal and national, but this is really a book about complicated love, asking “why barbed wire’s besotted with its barbs”.' – Graeme Richardson, The Sunday Times, Poetry Books of the Year 2025
‘Avidya by Vidyan Ravinthiran draws on the poet’s travels to the north of Sri Lanka, where his family are from, and his move to the US. As poems of journeys, they put me in mind at times of James Fenton, while Ravinthiran’s immersion in the English canon means linguistic delights throughout – “rivering, glitch-thronged, dubitable … belied, / believed, beloved”.’ – Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian (The best poetry books of 2025)
‘Vidyan Ravinthiran’s Avidya is a book for travellers. The poet takes us from the England of his birth, to the Sri Lanka of his Tamil parents, to the US, where he works at Harvard. […] In dialogue here not just with his Sri Lankan heritage, but with Keats, Marvell, Seamus Heaney and Walter de la Mare, Ravinthiran deserves more recognition as one of our most musical and memorable poets.' – Graeme Richardson, The Sunday Times (Summer Poetry Round-up)
‘Avidya takes its title from a Sanskrit word that translates as ignorance or unseeing. Throughout the collection, we see the various unknowings which structure a life. ‘As’ the British child of Sri Lankan immigrants, now himself moved to the USA, Ravinthiran is used, we learn, to speaking across gaps. [...] This tension between images and their others is one of the achievements of Avidya . I came away moved by its varieties of disturbance, by the portrait of a life lived, like all lives only more so, in the shadow of what might have been. But Ravinthiran’s rarer merit is the patient construction of individual poems. […] details become luminous in a way that deepens, rather than glosses over, the shadows of history.' – Hugh Foley, The London Magazine
'Vidyan Ravinthiran’s remarkable ability to set the tone of a poem in the colours of landscape and memory is never better served than in this brief, dense excursion into the heartland of Sri Lankan history. By turns erudite and wise – the poet’s sense of his own origins, of his own place in the internecine cultural climate of the island nation’s recent past is explored with the supportive weight of insight – ‘The last train’ is both elegy and reflection refracted through the prism of suggestion.’ – Steve Whitaker, Poem of the Week, Yorkshire Times, on a poem from Avidya
‘Previous Northern Writers’ Awards recipient Vidyan Ravinthiran’s new collection, Avidya, explores the poet’s movements between the UK, Sri Lanka and the US over the past ten years. An extraordinarily accomplished and tender poet, Ravinthiran’s new work is much anticipated.’ – Will Mackie, New & Recent Poetry from the North, Spring 2025
'Through allegory, mythology and the examination of war, this is one of the best collections to explore being a Tamil from Sri Lanka. Navigating the conflict between “impulse and form” these poems seek to understand abandoned landscapes and history. Yet this is not a work of diasporan poetry: in Avidya, Ravinthiran is as much a part of “there” as he is of “here”. Finding peace within these pages, he speaks with authority as one who is embraced by a reclaimed heritage.' – Shash Trevett, Poetry Book Society Summer Bulletin 2025
‘Contemporary poetry collections often fall into one of two dominant categories. One kind travels thoughtfully, claiming spaces in an unfamiliar elsewhere, the other stays at home, revisiting and refining material that’s more familiar. Avidyā, Vidyan Ravinthiran’s latest, represents for me the exploratory kind, a tour that skirts the flames of history in a relaxed almost self-effacing manner.’ – Carol Rumens, Poem of the Week, The Guardian
‘The marvelous, shape-shifting latest from Ravinthiran (after The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here) features poems of relocation and dislocation, cataloging the struggle to acclimatize while refusing bland truisms. A blending of cultures and landscapes—British, Sri Lankan, North American—creates moments of imagistic fusion in lines full of nuance about the complications of experience […] History and the domestic clash within an expansive literary heritage [...] Allusive, musical, studied yet tender, this is a wonder.’ – Publishers Weekly, starred review of Avidya
'In both Hinduism and Buddhism, the Sanskrit word Avidyā refers to a concept often translated as “ignorance,” or “misunderstanding,” or “delusion.” In this compelling, piercing collection, Vidyan Ravinthiran reflects on what ignorance gives rise to and how it persists, through the Sri Lankan civil war that began in 1983 and ended 2009.' – Calista McRae, On The Sea Wall
'A compelling chronicler of the political history of the island country and the subcontinent, Avidya is an essential read and a powerful socio-political hymn.' – Smitha Sehgal, Scroll.in
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Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir:
In writing so candidly, Ravinthiran risks isolating a wide readership and forgoing mainstream attention. But ultimately, the risk is worthwhile. We deserve more stories untainted by hegemonic editorial standards and a toxic obsession with mainstream marketability. Ravinthiran, in Asian/Other, dares to pioneer a novel and necessary brand of storytelling.
Meena Venkataramanan, HIMAL Southasian
This is a book for anyone smitten with the possibilities of language, as well as anyone who has felt caught in the delicate weir of a loving family, the crosshairs of seemingly contradictory passions, or by the narrow checklist of identity categories used to sort and group us all, as individuals, in our personal, vocational, and civic lives. In other words, it is a memoir for this moment, when ideological and political divisions seem to be estranging us from imagining stories unlike our own.
Heather Treseler, On the Seawall
Beautifully written and impeccably argued.
Kirkus
Written in soaring, exhilarating prose. . . . this book will come to be seen as a turning point in writing about literature, race, identity, and otherness.
Neel Mukherjee, author of Choice
Asian/Other disrupts the silence and dispels the darkness into which so much vital testimony has been huddled. This is a bold, borderless, breathtaking memoir about race, language, inheritance, and love’s many forms and outposts.
Tracy K. Smith, author of Such Color
There's nothing like Asian/Other. . . . I received an education I didn't know I needed until I had found it. Read it.
Stephanie Burt, author of We Are Mermaids
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Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose:
To read prose for spontaneity is to imaginatively experience prose being spontaneously rewritten. Ravinthiran models this experience delightfully, in a range of texts whose delights have been kept from literary criticism far too long.
Brian Gingrich, American Literary History
The desire to match criticism to its subject, for criticism to feel its way into, and to precisely describe the affective pressures that texts might provoke in the reader presides over this outstanding book.
Andrew Taylor, The Review of English Studies
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Worlds Woven Together: Essays on Poetry and Poetics:
A book of the year in both the TLS (‘Incisive, reflective, illuminating’) and The White Review ('an inextinguishable curiosity and drive to read more deeply... inexorably beautiful').
Probing and provoking, far-ranging but astringent, Ravinthiran would appear a natural successor to Michael Hofmann as a doyen of the long-form essay […] a steely and eye-opening book.
David Wheatley, The Review of English Studies
What would an actually contemporary literary criticism sound like? This magisterial yet companionable book heralds the arrival of a major critical voice and prose stylist, a virtuoso modeling for us ‘styles of attention.’ Vidyan Ravinthiran brings to poetries in English his erudition, formal acuities, a passionately deprovincializing sensibility, political and ethical attunement, and stylistic panache. From Mir Taqi Mir to Thomas Hardy to Elizabeth Bishop to Srinivas Rayaprol, Ravinthiran surveys the territory and remakes it (to use imperial metaphors he would abjure). Impassioned, elegant, sometimes barbed, this is restless, startlingly illuminating criticism. In Ravinthiran, a poet as well as critic, the world-making and world-registering powers of poetry find a brilliant, vivifying advocate.
Maureen N. McLane, author of My Poets
Ravinthiran is a rare critic: one whose deep-diving, finely wrought readings across multiple poetic traditions are dexterous as well as authoritative. He brings a poet’s enthusiasm for craft and language to a reevaluation of critical culture, speaking with great clarity and personality in a voice so capacious that we are compelled to listen, to learn.
Sandeep Parmar, author of Reading Mina Loy's Autobiographies
Vidyan Ravinthiran writes with readerly passion and intellectual commitment about poetry he loves, at once deeply expert and finely attuned to the pleasures of literary language. The range of authors he celebrates is as impressive as the critical imagination with which he celebrates them. His is a distinctive and memorable voice which speaks eloquently to readers both within and without the academy.
Seamus Perry, editor of Essays in Criticism
Vidyan Ravinthiran’s beautifully written, richly insightful collection is extraordinary in its geographic and cultural breadth, its incisive attention to form, its fusion of the strengths of journalistic and scholarly writing, and its chameleonic openness to, and close tracking of, the twists and turns of poetry. An eye-opening delight for poets and poetry readers.
Jahan Ramazani, author of Poetry in a Global Age
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Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala and English poetry from Sri Lanka and its diaspora
received a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation in 2023. It was also a book of the year in the TLS (‘My anthology of the year […] everything an anthology should be: conscientious, archival, surprising, world-building, full of voices and lives’).
'There are angry waves crashing throughout this collection, the reverberations of colonialism and imperialism, swelled into a civil war, factions and the demonising of Muslim communities, yet amid all of this, each poem is a silent dewdrop shining on the Sri Lankan diaspora. A compilation of jasmine in full bloom and honey birds by day.' - Roy McFarlane, PBS Selector, Poetry Book Society Summer Bulletin 2023
‘Out of Sri Lanka’s post-1948 verse defies Anglo-American marginalisations of ‘world poetry’ and demands we encounter this rich body of work as poetry without qualifying adjectives.’ – Orla Polten, New Internationalist
‘This expansive and exciting anthology is edited by Shash Trevett, Seni Seneviratne and Vidyan Ravinthiran … and includes poems by new poets alongside older work, some of which was previously out of print.’ - Will Mackie, New & Recent Poetry from the North, New Writing North
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Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic
was awarded both the University English First Book Prize, 2016, and the Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism, 2016.
From the Chair’s Report for the UE Prize: “the judges…were unanimous in their decision to award the prize to Vidyan Ravinthiran for Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic… a dazzling study of the formal life of the prose of one of the greatest writers of the modern period — her essays, prose poems, and letters. The book establishes a way of analysing the rhythms of prose in a way which will be exemplary for other scholars of the subject, exploring the minutiae of Bishop’s practice with memorably impressive insight and tact. This is a book which effectively discovers a new subject for critical and scholarly enquiry and describes its flexible and responsive genius with remarkable success.”
And the Warren-Brooks judges: “a new perspective on the works of the 20th century American writer Elizabeth Bishop. The selection committee was particularly impressed by the originality, strong scholarship, readability and wide-ranging appeal of Ravinthiran’s work.”
The Elizabeth Bishop Bulletin: “a compelling and fundamental breakthrough in Elizabeth Bishop scholarship as well as in the study of literary genre […] beautifully written, informed not just by Bishop critics but also by important (and neglected) poetry critics of at least the last 100 years […] The book will be a building block for further studies of Bishop’s prose rhythms, and her innovative poetics in the ongoing evolution of poetry. Scholars and poets will delight on hundreds of pithy observations, fresh readings and analyses made here.
[…] We have no doubt that this is a book that will both change Bishop scholarship at the same time as refining our understanding of twentieth-century poetic history.”
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The Million-Petalled Flower of Being:
'To commit an entire collection to the sonnet is a brave act. It shows not just trust in one's abilities but also a humility before the form that any kind of success demands. Few have achieved this in many years but The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here offers an object lesson in finding the scope of the modern sonnet, and using it to record the beauty, sadness, and complexity of the everyday.' - John Burnside, Chair of Judges, T S Eliot Prize 2019
'To me the sonnet should be listed as a piece of UNESCO intangible heritage because the sonnet has lasted for so long in so many different ways...Vidyan Ravinthrian has written an amazing book entirely of sonnets...he's making the sonnet shine. This really is a fantastic, fantastic collection.' - Ian McMillan, introducing Vidyan Ravinthiran at the T S Eliot Prize Readings, 12 January 2020
'My personal favourite...is Vidyan Ravinthiran's The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here, a wonderful sonnet sequence which, as its title implies, is a little bit about everything, including wrens and whimbrels.' - Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Sunday Times [reviewing the ten collections shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize 2019]
'Every poem in Ravinthiran's second collection is a sonnet addressed to his wife, but here is no lack of variety in topic or tone. From interracial love to Sri Lanka's civil war, mental health to Brexit, the range itself speaks of the ideal spouse: the person with whom we can talk about absolutely anything.' - Maria Crawford, Financial Times (Books of the Year 2019: Poetry)
'Formally assured but far from formulaic, this book of sonnets for the poet's wife is testament, at its best, to the ways in which poetry can reach from the particular to the universal. Moving and inviting in their conversational ease, Ravinthiran's sonnets stretch from the grounding details of life for a mixed-race couple in England today... to thoughtfully touch on themes of identity, class, work and community.' - Ben Wilkinson, The Guardian
'...Ravinthiran's second collection is a sequence of loose, warm love sonnets to his wife The outside world leaks through in nods to Brexit and his Sri Lankan family, Larkin and Borges, Super Mario and The X-Files.' --Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph
This is a collection both about the particulars of shared domestic life, and one charged with greater, uninvited, forces. It is about the persistence of that love, and how it might be brought to bear on the wider world; how the intercultural understanding which exists in a couple, if scaled up, has the power to make the world anew, to bring into being new and wondrous modes of coexistence. --Stephanie Sy-Quia, Poetry School
The poet's domestic introspection is no less than a conduit for contemplation of the troubles which define many lives. And in this fine collection, they include racism...cultural dislocation, mental illness, politics and identity...Vidyan Ravinthiran's collection is both bracing and complex, and it is difficult to give a comprehensive review of such a diversionary, inclusive body of work without venturing into essay territory. --Steve Whitaker, The Yorkshire Times
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Grun-tu-molani:
Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize and the 2015 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize.
'As a very rare kind of British poet indeed - one from a Sri Lankan background readers might expect Vidyan Ravinthiran to have a lot of important things to say. He does, but, like Oscar Wilde, whom this witty and ambitious debut quotes twice, Grun-tu-molani also delights in wrong-footing expectations of earnestness' – Jeremy Noel-Tod, Sunday Times.
'“Grun-tu-molani” is borrowed from Bellow’s phrase meaning “man wants to live” and Ravinthiran’s verse seems driven by a comparably urgent impulse, to perfect his craft. From translations of ancient Tamil texts to contemporary riffs on recession and technology, he combines formal range with wit as well as moral, sensual and emotional complexity' – Maria Crawford, Financial Times, Summer books 2014.
'Grun-tu-Molani brings a light touch and a sometimes damning elegance to subjects including MTV, a chair addressing Jackie Chan, the Tamil Tigers, militarism and the purpose of money – recalling the early Michael Hofmann as he does so, which is a good sign' – Sean O'Brien, Independent.
‘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… 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’ – Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.