केदारनाथ सिंह / Kedarnath Singh
Kedarnath Singh was born in 1934 in Chakiya village in District Baliya, near Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh. He received his early education in Chakiya, and then moved to Banaras for high school and college. He earned his M.A. in Hindi from Banaras Hindu University, and went on to complete his Ph.D. in 1964. Over the next decade, he taught at various institutions in the region, including Uday Pratap College, Banaras, and Gorakhpur University. He accepted a position at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, in 1976, and taught there until his retirement in the late 1990s. He continues to live in New Delhi. Singh began writing poetry in Banaras around 1952. Among his collections of poems are Abhi bilkul abhi (1960); Jamin pak rahi hai (1980); Akal mein saras (1989), which won the Sahitya Akademi poetry prize for that year; Uttar Kabir aur anya kavitaen (1995); and Tolstoy aur cycle (2004). His Pratinidhi kavitaen, a volume of selected poems edited by Parmanand Shrivastav, appeared in 1985 and was reissued in 2000. He has published three influential books of scholarly criticism and essays in Hindi, and has also edited volumes of poetry in Hindi translation. His awards include the Kumaran Asan Prize (Kerala), the Maithilisharan Gupt Prize (Madhya Pradesh), and the Dinkar Prize (Bihar). His poems have been translated into several Indian languages, and also into such European languages as Spanish, Dutch, German, Russian, and Hungarian.