Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in Leeds, England, 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. 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, a fusion of poetry criticism and memoir (W.W. Norton, US; Icon Books, UK, 2024).

'To commit an entire collection to the sonnet is a brave act. It shows not just trust in one's abilities but also a humility before the form that any kind of success demands. Few have achieved this in many years but The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here offers an object lesson in finding the scope of the modern sonnet, and using it to record the beauty, sadness, and complexity of the everyday.' - John Burnside, Chair of Judges, T S Eliot Prize 2019

'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

'Skill meets great tenderness in Vidyan Ravinthiran's sonnet series The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here. These poems brim with ingenuity and each one is a small feat of linguistic daring. Taking love and wonderment as a broad umbrella, we track the intimacies of a marriage through displays of nationalism, xenophobia, familial distance as well as the every day moments known only between lovers. The reader is invited into the home and imaginations of a husband and wife and feels that they are less interloper than celebrant witnessing an enduring bond--not just theirs but what links us as people inhabiting the same world. As Ravinthiran writes in 'Union', "It's with your love I try to love that stranger / who walked so far to read this page."' - Sandeep Parmar and Naomi Shihab Nye, Co-Judges for the Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections 2021

'Every poem in Ravinthiran's second collection is a sonnet addressed to his wife, but here is no lack of variety in topic or tone. From interracial love to Sri Lanka's civil war, mental health to Brexit, the range itself speaks of the ideal spouse: the person with whom we can talk about absolutely anything.' - Maria Crawford, Financial Times (Best Poetry Books of the Year 2019)

'Ravinthiran's second collection is a sequence of loose, warm love sonnets to his wife... The outside world leaks through in nods to Brexit and his Sri Lankan family, Larkin and Borges, Super Mario and The X-Files.' - Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph

'In these days of polemical identity assertion it's refreshing to read a book whose explorations of identity and relationship are as generous, subtle and sensitively enquiring as these... The heart of the volume is the thoughtfulness with which personal difficulties are related to wider issues, the intimacy with which personal vulnerabilities are revealed, the radiance of the love breaking through clouds of difficulty and distraction, and the generosity of spirit looking with an equal eye at the poet's own experience and that of other people.' - Edmund Prestwich, PN Review

'Through these beautiful poems of love and the domestic, we encounter the wider world; its racism, its parents, its day-to-day minutiae of living... There is violence lurking here too, a history which keeps threatening to break out from the tight lines and, alongside love, we are asked to consider the value of art, and of politics as well; the ultimate effect and feeling is one of radical sincerity as we move through the collection. Larkin, who gives this collection its title, was a poet who was never afraid to reach towards "Poetry", towards the transcendent truth of the perfectly-selected image. He does not go un-critiqued within this collection, but this is a collection with that same sincere belief in the power of language to capture a feeling precisely.' - Andrew McMillan, PBS Bulletin

'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

'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