Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and the legacy of Indian English poetry

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra was born in 1947, in Lahore. He is a noted Indian poet and is regarded as the figure head of contemporary Indian English poetry tradition, a legacy that has taken forward the works of  AK Ramanujan and Nissim Ezekiel. He is also a literary critic, anthologist and translator. Mehrotra was a founder member of the iconic poetry collective Clearing House along with Adil Jussawalla, Gieve Patel and Arun Kolatkar. Noted for the innovative exploration of traditional and unconventional Indian lifestyles, no collection of modern Indian English poetry can afford to leave him out. His unabashed take on conservative ideas has often sparked controversy.

Mehrotra is the author of four collections of poetry, Nine Enclosures (1976), Distance in Statute Miles (1982), Middle Earth (1984) and The Transfiguring Places (1998); two of translation, The Absent Traveller (1991) and Songs of Kabir (2011).  He was the editor of The  Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992). 

Mehrotra divides his time between Dehradun and Allahabad, and occasionally gives lectures on poetry in American universities. He was nominated for the chair of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford in 2009.

Recent book:  Collected Poems (2014, Penguin Modern Classics) is a comprehensive collection of Mehrotra's work and including thirty four new poems.

Quirky fact: On most days, he is assumed to be a foreigner when he walks down the streets of Allahabad, with his white hair, pair of denims, and cigarette on his lips.