Vidyan Ravinthiran Readings
'Allusive, musical, studied yet tender, this is a wonder.’ – Publishers Weekly, starred review of Avidya
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, Avidya, was published by Bloodaxe in April 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.
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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
‘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
FORTHCOMING EVENTS
VIDYAN RAVINTHIRAN TO DELIVER LECTURE AT LEDBURY POETRY FESTIVAL
Saturday 28 June 2025, 4pm-5pm, Burgage Hall, Ledbury
Ledbury Poetry Critics co-founder Vidyan Ravinthiran will be giving the University of Liverpool Kenneth Allott / Poetry Society Summer Lecture on the topic of 'Pleasure'. This takes place at Burgage Hall at 4pm. Vidyan's third poetry collection Avidyā was published by Bloodaxe in April 2025.
This year's Ledbury Poetry Festival runs from 27th June to 6th July and features a huge range of events and workshops, both in person and online. Weekend passes, digital passes and concession tickets are available.
Tickets: £14
https://ledburypoetry.org.uk/home/whats-on/
PAST EVENTS
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]
