Avidya

Vidyan Ravinthiran (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

72 Seiten

2025 | Paperback original
Bloodaxe Books Ltd (Verlag)
978-1-78037-739-1 (ISBN)

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Avidya is a political and a spiritual collection shaped by myth and philosophy, and by Sri Lankan as well as global crises. It is also a book about the forms of strength and fear that parents pass on to their children. These poems emerged from journeys of personal significance, and out of a migrant sensibility tied to three different countries.

These poems emerged from journeys of great personal significance, and out of a migrant sensibility tied to three different countries. Sensuous, droll, yearning, they consider otherwise forgotten (ignored, repressed, erased) events.

In 2017, Vidyan Ravinthiran travelled to the north of Sri Lanka where his parents grew up – it finally felt safe – visiting war-torn Tamil areas overwritten by a tourist focus on the sun-spoiled South. In 2020, he, his wife and their one-year-old moved from Britain to the United States, months before the pandemic hit and the travel ban separated them for almost two years from family overseas.

Avidya is a political and a spiritual collection, whose multiple poetic forms, open and closed, are shaped by myth and philosophy, and by Sri Lankan as well as global crises. It is also a book about the forms of both strength and fear that parents pass on to their children.

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 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize and the 2021 Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. His third collection, Avidya, is published by Bloodaxe in 2025. 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. He is the author of Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic (Bucknell, 2015), winner of both the University English Prize and the Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism; a collection of essays, Worlds Woven Together (Columbia University Press, 2022); a critical study, Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose (OUP, 2020); and Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir, a fusion of poetry criticism and memoir (W.W. Norton, US; Icon Books, UK, 2025).

9 As a
10 Your demon’s basic
12 Next time
14 Trinco
16 Nanthikadal
17 Burnt palmyra
18 Leaving Jaffna
19 May 2021
20 The elephant
22 The elephant
23 Trinco
24 A fisherman
25 The last train
26 The Annupoorunyamal
27 My mother’s English
28 Every year
30 Pillaiyar
32 Lasantha Wickrematunge
38 Autumn
40 Mourning
42 Sri Lanka
44 Rama’s bridge
45 Karna
57 My face
59 Hillside temple
60 Orts
64 Travellers
65 Eelam
66 Research
68 Jaffna, January 15, 2023
70 The Star of India
71 As a child

Erscheinungsdatum	14.05.2025
Verlagsort	Tyne and Wear
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Lyrik / Dramatik ► Lyrik / Gedichte
ISBN-10	1-78037-739-8 / 1780377398
ISBN-13	978-1-78037-739-1 / 9781780377391
Zustand	Neuware