Vidyan Ravinthiran

Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2025 

The poems of Vidyan Ravinthiran's third collection Avidya 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'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

Vidyan Ravinthiran talks about The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here

Vidyan Ravinthiran discusses his collection The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here following its shortlisting for the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize.

Vidyan Ravinthiran reads ‘New Year's Eve’

Vidyan Ravinthiran reads and introduces his poem ‘New Year's Eve’ from his T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted collection The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here.

Vidyan Ravinthiran reads ‘Sea break’

Vidyan Ravinthiran reads and introduces his poem ‘Sea break’ from his T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted collection The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here.

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