Ashwani Kumar

Ashwani Kumar is a poet, author and academic in Mumbai. Widely published, anthologized and translated into several Indian and foreign languages, his poems are noted for ‘lyrical celebration’ of garbled voices of memory and their subversive ‘whimsy’ quality. His major poetry volumes include ‘My Grandfather’s Imaginary Typewriter’, ‘And Banaras and the Other’. A collection of his selected poems titled ‘Architecture of Alphabets’ has been published in Hungarian. He is also the author of the acclaimed nonfiction ‘Community Warriors and one of the chief editors of ‘Global Civil Society’. Recently, he has edited ‘Rivers Going Home’(Red River), a major anthology in Indian poetry and also published Migrants, Mobility & Citizenship in India(Routledge). He co-curates the prestigious Chandrabhaga Poetry Festival @ Konark and co-founded Indian Novels Collective, an initiative to popularize translation of classic novels of Indian languages. He writes columns in the Financial Express, Outlook, the Hindu, and Times of India among others. In leisure, he makes his favourite Bihari litti-chokha, rides Derrida’s punctured bicycle and croons’ “Ooh La La Tu Hai Meri Fantasy!'