The Department of English welcomes poet, writer and professor Vidyan Ravinthiran from Harvard University.
The child of Sri Lankan Tamils, Ravinthiran grew up in a mixed area of Leeds (in the north of England), studied at Oxford and Cambridge, and is now the Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of the Humanities 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.
He's the author of two 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. Poems toward his third collection, "Avidya" (2025) have appeared in Poetry and The London Review of Books, among other periodicals.
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 collection of essays on poetry, "Worlds Woven Together," was a TLS Book of the Year, as 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. His latest monograph is "Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose" (OUP, 2023), and 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 organize Ledbury Emerging Critics, a UK/US scheme for increasing racial diversity in review-culture. He lives in Acton, Massachusetts with his son Frank and his wife Jenny Holden, who writes fiction.
Please join us in the Community Foundation Theater, located in the Gund Gallery, on Thursday, Oct.16, at 4:30 p.m.