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Joint Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2025
The poems in this collection emerged from journeys of great personal significance, and out of a migrant sensibility tied to three different countries: Sri Lanka, the UK and the USA. 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.
Avidya 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.
‘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
‘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)
'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 Seawall
'Through allegory, mythology and the examination of war, this is one of the best collections to explore being a Tamil from Sri Lanka. Navigating the conflict between “impulse and form” these poems seek to understand abandoned landscapes and history. Yet this is not a work of diasporan poetry: in Avidya, Ravinthiran is as much a part of “there” as he is of “here”. Finding peace within these pages, he speaks with authority as one who is embraced by a reclaimed heritage.' – Shash Trevett, Poetry Book Society Bulletin 2025
‘Contemporary poetry collections often fall into one of two dominant categories. One kind travels thoughtfully, claiming spaces in an unfamiliar elsewhere, the other stays at home, revisiting and refining material that’s more familiar. Avidyā, Vidyan Ravinthiran’s latest, represents for me the exploratory kind, a tour that skirts the flames of history in a relaxed almost self-effacing manner.’ – Carol Rumens, Poem of the Week, The Guardian
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 and is the joint winner of 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. 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: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir, a fusion of poetry criticism and memoir, which was published in January 2025 by Norton in the USA and by Icon in the UK.