#  Vidyan Ravinthiran 

 



   ![vid](/sites/g/files/omnuum3821/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/vidyan/files/img_20210820_150434102_portrait.jpg?itok=He5dWBek) 

 

The child of Sri Lankan Tamils, Vidyan Ravinthiran grew up in a mixed area of Leeds (in the North of England), studied at Oxford and Cambridge, and is now a Professor of English at Harvard. He teaches courses on John Keats, Elizabeth Bishop, South Asian poetry, epic, literary forms, and also convenes Harvard's [first ever course on video games](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/03/new-english-class-focuses-on-video-game-narratives/).

He's the author of three books of verse. Poems from *Grun-tu-molani* (Bloodaxe, 2014) appeared in *The Guardian, The Sunday Times* and *The Financial Times.* *The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here* (2019) won a Northern Writers Award, was a PBS Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the Forward and the T.S. Eliot Prizes. His latest book, *Avidya,* won the 2025 Forward Prize for Best Collection. To read Vidyan's verse online, click on "Links and reviews".

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. *Worlds Woven Together,* a collection of essays on poetry, including those which won him *Poetry* magazine's Editors' Prize for Reviewing, was a *TLS* Book of the Year; so was *Out of Sri Lanka,* which he co-edited with Shash Trevett and Seni Seneviratne: the first ever anthology of Sri Lankan *and* diasporic poetry. He is also the author of *Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose* (OUP, 2023) and *Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir* (Norton and Icon, 2025), a fusion of memoir and poetry criticism.

He has published many scholarly, and journalistic, articles on the cognitions of form in both poetry and prose, encompassing works from multiple time-periods and nations. He helps organise [Ledbury Critics](https://poetrysociety.org.uk/news/ledbury-emerging-poetry-critics-2021-announced/), a transatlantic scheme for increasing racial diversity in review-culture. He lives in Acton, MA with his son Frank and his wife [Jenny Holden, who writes fiction](https://www.jennyholden.co.uk/short-stories/).

His next book is *Poetry and Opinion*, forthcoming from Cambridge UP. Identifying ourselves with our opinions, and others, including writers, with theirs—and taking the form of the opinion as the epitome of political engagement—we assert a picture of the self that ought to be scrutinized. Mass print generated, along with the railways, telegraph, information-relays national and global, as well as the development of specialized forms of technological, scientific, economic, and medical knowledge, a sea of discourse belying any vision of a cogent public sphere: disinformation is not a purely 21st century, internet phenomenon. Poetry helps us understand this situation. Appearing in verse, claims about reality have been characterized, or have self-characterized, as virtual. As such, Romantic and post-Romantic poetry makes perceptible other ways in which, in other precincts, utterance becomes virtualized. Sometimes, by the psychological turbulences of the citizen-as-creature, appropriating world events to the need to self-assert; sometimes, as a result of affective matrices that challenge the idea that we are the authors of our own opinions.

For Vidyan, poetry is a transnational and transhistorical counter-language to be explored in creative ways: traditional ideas of the "canon" and the anticanonical, and categorizations tied to time-periods and nation-states, are too rigid. *Poetry and Opinion* moves fluidly between work by John Keats, Solmaz Sharif, Rosmarie Waldrop, Matthew Arnold, William Blake, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Harryette Mullen, John Forbes, Sean Bonney, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, Eunice de Souza, James Wright, August Kleinzahler, Ada Limón, Louis MacNeice, and Byron.