Vidyan Ravinthiran, photo courtesy of the artist.
A new season of voices opens at Literary Cabaret.
Part of the Spring Writing Residency at Banff Centre, Chapter 1 features original work from this season’s writers-in-residence across genres, including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid forms. Each chapter in the series presents a distinct lineup, offering a window into the breadth of practices gathered this spring.
The evening is hosted by poet and critic Vidyan Ravinthiran, born in Leeds to Sri Lankan Tamil parents. His debut collection Grun-tu-molani was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. He will guide the program and close the evening with a reading from his own work.
Settle in with a drink from the bar, browse a curated selection of books from Pages, and experience the creative atmosphere of CLVB ’33.
Doors open at 6:15 p.m., with readings beginning at 7:00 p.m. Informal mingling continues until 9:30 p.m.
About Vidyan Ravinthiran
Vidyan Ravinthiran
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, Avidya, is due from Bloodaxe in 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. 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, a fusion of poetry criticism and memoir forthcoming from Icon in the UK and Norton in the US.