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 teaches courses on John Keats, Elizabeth Bishop, South Asian poetry, epic, literary forms, and also convenes Harvard's first ever course on video games.

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. To read Vidyan's verse online, click on "Links and reviews".

Vidyan's first monograph, Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic (Bucknell UP, 2015) won both the University English Prize and the Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism. Hiscollection of essays on poetry, Worlds Woven Together, was a TLS Book of the Year, as was Out of Sri Lanka, which he co-edited with Shash Trevett and Seni Seneviratne -- the first ever anthology of Sri Lankan and diasporic poetry. His latest monograph is Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose (OUP, 2023), and he has published many scholarly, and journalistic, articles on the cognitions of form in both poetry and prose, encompassing works from multiple time-periods and nations. He helps organise Ledbury Emerging Critics, a UK/US scheme for increasing racial diversity in review-culture. He lives in Acton, MA with his son Frank and his wife Jenny Holden, who writes fiction.

Vidyan's next two books are Asian/Other (Icon / Norton) and Poetry and Opinion (Cambridge UP).

Asian / Other combines memoir with literary criticism. The title comes from the Equal Opportunity box that Vidyan, being Sri Lankan Tamil-British, has had to tick many times—not fitting into the given categories. It's a book about what it's like to be a minority within a minority: to never or rarely see anyone who looks like you on TV; to not have powerful spokespeople for your subject-position in the legacy media or online; and to suffer forms of racism many would no longer dare to aim at other races. But it's also about the need to press beyond a harsh identitarianism which doesn't allow for conversations between cultures at all, and which treats differences as ungetroundable rather than points of imaginative contact. Extracts have appeared in Poetry London, Granta, and the Cambridge Literary Review.

Poetry and Opinion reinvigorates the debate about poetry’s relation to statements of fact, that has continued down the ages from Sidney (“the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth”) to J.L. Austin, as well as poetry specialists such as Barbara Herrnstein Smith. Inspired by today’s politics, media and technology, Vidyan focuses “opinion” rather than fact, examining a wide range of post-Romantic (and some Romantic) lyric and post-lyric writing. Why are our opinions so irrepressible, so violent, and so important to us? It’s as if we’re trying to persuade ourselves and others that, knowing what we think, we know who we are; insisting (athwart our doubts) that the social remains connected to the political. Our ferocity comes of, and seeks to obscure, the fear our words are powerless. If the poem, seen as an emplaced utterance, overlaps with opinion, poems also become places where the impulse to opinionate is critiqued. Poetry’s “extravagance”, to apply Robert Frost, both reflects and refracts our habits of exaggeration; if the best kind of heightening, and intensification of language, comes, as Wordsworth claimed, of passion, then poems are curious as to where our energies originate, how they can self-shape or be deformed by external forces; also, as to what happens to psychological impulsions when they go public in verbal forms sometimes playing at structureless (sincere) effusions (poems compare here, with soundbites and tweets). If we’ve come to assume an identity between opinions and principles, poems remind us that every utterance is creaturely before it is abstract.