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Author Event! Vidyan Ravinthiran's "Asian/Other"
Join us on Saturday, May 10th at 4pm as we host Vidyan Ravinthiran, who will be reading from and discussing his latest, Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir. Signed copies of the book are available for purchase.
About the book:
A perceptive exploration of poetry, race, and otherness from one of our most promising voices in criticism.
Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in the north of England to Sri Lankan Tamils, and moved to the United States five years ago. Considering identity in both its political and psychological senses, he leaps adventurously between memoir and criticism, understanding his life through poetry, and vice versa. Ranging from Andrew Marvell to Divya Victor, Ravinthiran writes both about and through poems, discussing Sri Lanka; experiences of racism and resilience; intergenerational trauma; pandemic parenting in an autism family; relationships shaped by the internet; growing up with a speech impediment and being sent by one’s aspirational brown parents to elocution lessons; and the relative invisibility of South Asians in Western television and film. This electric, compelling hybrid memoir discovers a new way of writing about the self and also literature.
About the author:
The child of Sri Lankan Tamils, Vidyan Ravinthiran grew up in a mixed area of Leeds (in the North of England), studied at Oxford and Cambridge, and is now the Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard.
He's the author of two books of verse. Poems from Grun-tu-molani (Bloodaxe, 2014) appeared in The Guardian, The Sunday Times and The Financial Times. The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here (2019) won a Northern Writers Award, was a PBS Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the Forward and the T.S. Eliot Prizes. Poems toward his third collection, Avidya (2025) have appeared in Poetry and The London Review of Books, among other periodicals.
Vidyan's next two books are Asian/Other (Icon / Norton) and Poetry and Opinion (Cambridge UP).
Event Links
Website: https://go.evvnt.com/3034208-0
