Talk by Vidyan Ravinthiran (English, Harvard University)

What overlap is there between political, psychological and philosophical ideas of identity, and what role might poetry play in helping their convergence? Discussing his fusion of life-writing and verse criticism, Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir, and his Forward Prize-winning poetry collection, Avidya—both published last year—Vidyan Ravinthiran considers alternatives to the ego-noise that so thoroughly permeates our cultural discourse, including our rhetorics of empowerment and critique.

Vidyan Ravinthiran is a Professor of English at Harvard University, where his teaching ranges from the Romantic poet John Keats to video game storytelling. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Avidya, winner of the 2025 Forward Prize; and several books of literary scholarship, including Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic, winner of both the University English Prize and the Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism. He co-edited with Shash Trevett and Seni Seneviratne Out of Sri Lanka, the first anthology of both Sri Lankan and diasporic poetry, including works originally written in English, Sinhala and Tamil—named a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, as was Worlds Woven Together, a collection of the essays that won him Poetry magazine’s Editors’ Prize for Reviewing. Vidyan’s most recent book is Poetry and Opinion, published this year by Cambridge University Press.

Books will be available for sale and signing, courtesy of Odyssey Bookstore.

The Rabindranath Tagore Lecture Series in Modern Indian Literature is made possible by a gift from the late Cornell Professor Emeritus Narahari Umanath Prabhu and his wife, Sumi Prabhu. Inspired by Rabindranath Tagore’s expansive imagination, unbounded by geopolitical boundaries, the series has regularly featured prominent writers from across South Asia and its diasporas.