Avidya
About this book
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.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- About the Author
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Acknowledgements
- Contents
- As a
- Your demon’s basic
- Next time
- Trinco
- Nanthikadal
- Burnt palmyra
- Leaving Jaffna
- May 2021
- The elephant
- The elephant
- Trinco
- A fisherman
- The last train
- The Annupoorunyamal
- My mother’s English
- Every year
- Pillaiyar
- Lasantha Wickrematunge
- Autumn
- Mourning
- Sri Lanka
- Rama’s bridge
- Karna
- My face
- Hillside temple
- Orts
- Travellers
- Eelam
- Research
- Jaffna, January 15, 2023
- The Star of India
- As a child
