Avidya - Couverture souple

Ravinthiran, Vidyan

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1780377398 ISBN 13 : 9781780377391

Editeur : Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 2025

Synopsis

Joint Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2025

The poems of Vidyan Ravinthiran's third collection Avidyā emerged from journeys of great personal significance, and out of a migrant sensibility tied to three different countries. 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.

Avidyā 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.

'Vidyan Ravinthiran's Avidyā is a deeply moving, relevant, necessary collection of poems that meditates on identity and belonging. A fusion of Sri Lankan culture, Englishness, whatever that has come to mean in this moment and in context of this book, and the questions that it asks about what it is to speak English are profoundly relevant and timely given the political situation in terms of the rise of the far right, and what is happening in terms of xenophobic ideas of who belongs and who doesn't. I found this profoundly moving to read. It touched me deeply.' – Rommi Smith, Co-Judge of the Forward Prizes 2025

‘As one of the judges for the 2025 Forward Prizes, I’ve had a full-on year of reading poetry collections. The variety of entries was wonderful and it was quite a journey through the wild ecosystem of contemporary poetry. For the first time ever – and recognising the need for cultural collegiality and new value systems – the main prize for best collection was shared by two writers: Karen Solie for Wellwater (Picador) and Vidyan Ravinthiran for Avidya (Bloodaxe). The former tackles environmental breakdown, corporate control, inheritance and family; the latter migration, war, mythology and belonging. Both are lyrical, humorous, astute and beautiful. Where politics obfuscates and fails to tackle issues honestly, poems are often far deadlier, more truthful and exacting. I can’t think of two more artful commentaries on today’s world or two more inviting entryways into modern poetry.’ – Sarah Hall, The New Statesman (Books of the Year 2025)

'Avidya shared the Forward prize for best collection this year (with Karen Solie’s Wellwater), and the only surprise was the sharing. Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in Leeds to Sri Lankan Tamil parents and he explores two worlds and two languages. [...] Avidya deals with political violence: Sri Lanka “a teardrop on the map” where “the pen is a torn-out tooth”. The collection traces difficult histories, personal and national, but this is really a book about complicated love, asking “why barbed wire’s besotted with its barbs”.' – Graeme Richardson, The Sunday Times, Poetry Books of the Year 2025

‘Avidya by Vidyan Ravinthiran draws on the poet’s travels to the north of Sri Lanka, where his family are from, and his move to the US. As poems of journeys, they put me in mind at times of James Fenton, while Ravinthiran’s immersion in the English canon means linguistic delights throughout – “rivering, glitch-thronged, dubitable … belied, / believed, beloved”.’ – Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian (The best poetry books of 2025)

‘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 [...] Allusive, musical, studied yet tender, this is a wonder.’ – Publishers Weekly, starred review of Avidyā

‘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

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

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, Avidyā, 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.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
• Date d'édition: 2025
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1780377398
• ISBN 13: 9781780377391
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 72
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Allemagne