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 was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. It was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and the 2021 Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. His third collection, Avidyā (Bloodaxe, 2025) was named as the joint winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection (with Karen Solie’s Wellwater). Vidyan Ravinthiran is co-editor with Seni Seneviratne and Shash Trevett of the anthology Out of Sri Lanka (Bloodaxe Books, 2023), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. After teaching at the universities of Cambridge, Durham and Birmingham in the UK, he now teaches at Harvard in the US. Author photo © Jenny Holden
This biography is taken from the Bloodaxe Books website.
