Arvind Krishna Mehrotra


Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is an Indian poet, anthologist, literary critic and translator.

Biography

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra was born in Lahore in 1947. He has published six collections of poetry in English and two of translation — a volume of Prakrit love poems, The Absent Traveller, recently reissued in Penguin Classics, and Songs of Kabir. His Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets has been very influential. He has edited several books, including History of Indian Literature in English and Collected Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar. His collection of essays Partial Recall: Essays on Literature and Literary History was published by Permanent Black in 2012. A second book of essays, Translating the Indian Past, appeared in 2019.
Mehrotra was nominated for the post of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford in 2009. He came second behind Ruth Padel, who later resigned over allegations of a smear campaign against Trinidadian poet Derek Walcott.
Mehrotra has translated more than 200 literary works from ancient Prakrit language, and from Hindi, Bengali and Gujarati.

Poetry Collections