Rukmini Bhaya Nair is a Delhi-based poet and professor of linguistics and English at the Indian Institute of Technology. Described by poet Keki Daruwalla as the author of “the first significant volume of post-modern poetry written by an Indian”, she has published three books of poetry: The Hyoid Bone (1992), The Ayodhya Cantos (1999) and Yellow Hibiscus (2004) as well as a highly acclaimed novel Mad Girl’s Love Song (HarperCollins, 2013) and most recently a linguistics monograph, Keywords for India: A Conceptual Lexicon for the 21st Century. (Bloomsbury Academic. 2020). Nair studied in Kolkata and England, and obtained her doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1982. Widely recognised for her work in the areas of linguistics, cognition and literary theory, she has taught at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, the National University of Singapore and the University of Washington at Seattle. Her creative and critical writings are taught on courses at universities such as Chicago, Kent, Oxford and Washington. Her ‘polyphonous’ literary style seeks to connect her varied interests in literary theory and cultural studies. She claims that the impulse to turn out “fat academic volumes and fragile books of verse” is the same in her case – to discover the limits of language. Her ambition, she says, “is simply to write and research, whatever the genre and whatever the odds”. In 1990, Nair won the first prize in the All-India Poetry Society/ British Council competition. Her work has since appeared in Penguin New Writing in India (1992), Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets (2002), and several other anthologies. It has also been translated into languages as varied as Swedish, Macedonian, Bengali and Hindi.
