Vidyan Ravinthiran Readings
'Allusive, musical, studied yet tender, this is a wonder.’ – Publishers Weekly, starred review of Avidya
Vidyan Ravinthiran's third poetry collection Avidyā was published by Bloodaxe in April 2025. It jointly won the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2025.
The poems of Avidyā, Vidyan Ravinthiran's third poetry collection, 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. Avidyā 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, Avidyā, was published by Bloodaxe in April 2025 and is on the shortlist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 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. His memoir Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir, a fusion of poetry criticism and memoir, was published in January 2025 by Norton in the USA and by Icon in the UK.
Vidyan Ravinthiran launched Avidyā online with Bloodaxe on April 2025 (scroll down to see the video). He gave the University of Liverpool Kenneth Allott / Poetry Society Summer Lecture on the topic of 'Pleasure' at Ledbury Poetry Festival on 28 June 2025, and also gave a reading from his new collection.
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‘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: “from our kitchen the time-travelling smell/ of chicken curry floats to Walden Pond.” Allusive, musical, studied yet tender, this is a wonder.’ – Publishers Weekly, starred review of Avidya
https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781780377391
‘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)
'... a tour that skirts the flames of history in a relaxed almost self-effacing manner.’ – Carol Rumens, Poem of the Week, The Guardian, on Avidya
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/aug/11/poem-of-the-week-autumn-by-vidyan-ravinthiran
An excellent essay review went online on the US community gallery for new writing and commentary On The Sea Wall on 9 September 2025.
'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
Avidyā is distributed in the US by Consortium Book Sales.
FORTHCOMING ONLINE EVENT AT PUSH THE BOAT OUT
Saturday 22 November 2025, 2-3pm, Push the Boat Out (online)
Online Double Bill: Between the Historical and the Imaginary
Arundhathi Subramaniam and Vidyan Ravinthiran will be taking part in an online event for Push the Boat Out in Edinburgh. They will be joining the event from India and the USA.
Vidyan Ravinthiran’s third collection Avidyā, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, emerged from journeys of great personal significance, and out of a migrant sensibility tied to three different countries. Sensuous, droll, yearning, these poems remember events that have otherwise been erased. Arundhathi Subramaniam’s poems in The Gallery of Upside Down Women also map a world trying to find its axis in a season of change. Wandering through these pages though are extraordinary women, who vault nimbly over borders, walk naked, walk aslant.
Join these two poets online as they read from and discuss their luminous latest collections, the forgotten histories they dissect and the new worlds they point towards.
Tickets: £0-15.
Booking: https://pushtheboatout.org/events/online-double-bill-between-the-historical-and-the-imaginary/
PAST EVENTS
Sunday 26 October 2025, 7pm, Forward Prize Ceremony, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
Forward Prizes Ceremony 2025
The winners of all four categories were announced at the Forward Prize Ceremony which was held at the Queen Elizabeth Hall at London's Southbank Centre. The event featured readings by all the shortlisted poets.
Vidyan Ravinthiran read 'Mourning' from his third collection, Avidyā (introduced at 2:6:25). Avidyā was later announced as joint winner of the Best Collection Prize. Fellow Bloodaxe poet Niall Campbell read 'Apprenticeship' from his third collection The Island in the Sound (introduced at 2:12:15).
At 2.25:52, Chair of Judges Sarah Hall explained why the judges felt that their only option was to jointly award the prize to two collections: Vidyan Ravinthiran's Avidyā and Karen Solie's Wellwater. Both poets then came back onto the stage to be presented with their awards by William Sieghart.
Tuesday 22 April 2025, online launch reading with Pascale Petit, Vidyan Ravinthiran and Dis Poetry by Benjamin Zephaniah
Pascale Petit and Vidyan Ravinthiran celebrated the publication of their latest collections by reading live and discussing their books as well as Benjamin Zephaniah’s retrospective Dis Poetry: Selected Poems & Lyrics with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. The event includes clips of Benjamin Zephaniah performing and talking taken from Pamela Robertson-Pearce’s film To Do Wid Me which readers will be able access in full using the QR code printed in the book.
This free Bloodaxe launch event was streamed on YouTube Live and is now available below or here: https://youtube.com/live/5Zy29ZHqwtw.
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Vidyan Ravinthiran's The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here was his second collection. This book of sonnets for his wife is finely balanced between the inward and outward. These are love poems which, considering life in Northern England for a mixed-race couple, touch on Brexit; racist and sexist abuse; taboos surrounding mental health; and the poet's Sri Lankan Tamil heritage. It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for summer 2019 and was shortisted for both the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the T S Eliot Prize 2019.
Radio 3's The Verb recorded the T S Eliot Prize Readings held on 11 January 2020 at the Royal Festival Hall. Highlights from the readings were broadcast on The Verb on Friday 17 January, featuring all ten poets reading from their shortlisted collections.
‘I was blown away by Vidyan Ravinthrian’s collection The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here and his use of the sonnet form.’ – Ian McMillan, speaking on Radio 3’s The Verb
Vidyan features from 19:20: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00020s1
The readings by all ten poets can be heard in full on YouTube here.
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‘Formally assured but far from formulaic, this book of sonnets for the poet’s wife is testament, at its best, to the ways in which poetry can reach from the particular to the universal. Moving and inviting in their conversational ease, Ravinthiran’s sonnets stretch from the grounding details of life for a mixed-race couple in England today… to thoughtfully touch on themes of identity, class, work and community.’ – Ben Wilkinson, The Guardian
Read the full review here.
[08 May 2025]
