Abhay *ar (born 1980) is an Indian poet-diplomat and India's 21st Amb*ador to Madagascar and Amb*ador to Comoros. He has served in different diplomatic capacities earlier in Russia, Nepal and Brazil. His published collections of poetry include Monsoon,The Magic of Madagascar, The Alphabets of Latin America, The Prophecy of Brasilia,The Eight-Eyed Lord of Kathmandu,The Seduction of Delhi among others, while his edited books are CAPITALS, 100 Great Indian Poems, 100 More Great Indian Poems, New Brazilian Poems, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Great Indian Poems,The Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems among others. His translation of Kalidasa's Meghaduta and Ritusamhara has received Kalinga Literary Festival 2020-2021 Poetry Book of the Year Award. He recorded his poems at the Library of Congress. His poem 'The Par*ioned Land' was taught at the Cornell University in the Fall 2021. His writings cover poetry, art, memoir, global democracy and digital diplomacy. His Earth Anthem has been translated into over 150 languages and was played at the United Nations to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Earth Day. He also wrote an anthem for SAARC spurring search for an official SAARC Anthem. He wrote a 'Moon Anthem' to celebrate the success of India's Moon Mission Chandrayaan-2. He has penned a 'Mars Anthem' to inspire the younger generation to explore our neighbouring red planet. He has penned anthems on all the planets in the Solar System.

He received the SAARC Literary Award for his contribution to contemporary South Asian Poetry and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2013. He has also been honoured with Asia-Pacific Excellence Award in 2014. His The Seduction of Delhi was shortlisted for Muse India-Satish Verma Young Writer Award 2015.

Contents

• 1 Early life
• 2 Career
  • 2.1 Diplomat
  • 2.2 Poet
• 3 Editor
  • 3.1 CAPITALS
  • 3.2 100 Great Indian Poems
  • 3.3 New Brazilian Poems
  • 3.4 100 More Great Indian Poems
  • 3.5 The Bloomsbury Anthology of Great Indian Poems
  • 3.6 The Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems
  • 3.7 The Book of Bihari Literature
• 4 Lyricist
• 5 Artist
• 6 Awards and recognition
• 7 Works
  • 7.1 Poetry Books
  • 7.2 Translated
  • 7.3 Edited
  • 7.4 Non-fiction
• 8 Research Work on Poetry of Abhay K.
• 9 Quotes
• 10 See also
• 11 References
• 12 External links

Early life

Abhay was born and raised near Rajgir in Nalanda district of Bihar. He studied at Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University. He joined the Indian Foreign Service in 2003. He studied Russian language, history and literature at the Moscow State University, U.S. foreign policy at George Washington University and has a Certificate in Poetry Writing from the International Writing Program, University of Iowa. He speaks Magahi, Hindi, English, Russian, Nepali, Portuguese and knows French and Sanskrit. He has translated poems of 60 Brazilian poets from Portuguese and Kālidāsa's Meghadūta and Ritusamharafrom Sanskrit.

Career

Diplomat

*ar is an Indian Foreign Service officer and has served in various positions at the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) of the government of India and at the Indian missions and posts abroad in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kathmandu and Brasilia. At the MEA headquarters in New Delhi he served as the Under Secretary Digital diplomacy and sent the first tweet after setting up an official Twitter account of the Ministry of External Affairs of India in 2010. He served as the spokesperson of the Emb*y of India, Kathmandu from 2012 to 2015. He was appointed Director of the Nehru Centre, London in March 2015. Subsequently, he was appointed as India's Deputy High Commissioner to Australia in August 2015. He currently serves as India's Amb*ador to the Indian Ocean islands of Madagascar and Comoros.He started Indian Foreign Service Day celebrations on 9 Oct in 2011. He also proposed celebration of the International Day of Diplomats on the United Nations Day which was celebrated in Brasilia for the first time on 24 Oct 2017 with the participation of diplomats from several countries. The second International Day was celebrated in Brasilia while the third one was celebrated in Madagascar. The fourth International Day of Diplomats was celebrated globally. The Emb*y of India, Antananarivo became the first Indian Emb*y to go solar on 2nd Oct 2020 during his tenure as Amb*ador of India to Madagascar and to have a Street Library.

Poet

Abhay K. and Forrest Gander at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2020 Abhay K, Fady Joudah, Lionel Fogarty, Sadaf Saz, Arjun Deo Charan, Ashok Bajpai at JLF 2015

Abhay *ar's first book *led River Valley to Silicon Valley(2007) was a memoir that also contained his first poem, 'Soul Song'. He has published eight collections of poetry. The Eight-Eyed Lord of Kathmandu (2017) is a collection on the UNESCO World Heritage sites, festivals, historical personalities, landscapes and prominent places of Nepal written during his stay in Nepal from 2012 to 2015. It was translated into Nepali as Jatra The Seduction of Delhi was shortlisted for the Muse India-Satish Verma Young Writer Award 2015. The poet Jayanta Mahapatra, thinks "qualities of love, tenderness and comp*ion set Abhay K's work apart from much of the general run of current poetics." Pulitzer Prize winning poet Forrest Gander says about The Alphabets of Latin America(2020)-"Abhay K. has a great sense of lineation, of understatement, of memorable, very particular images, and of m*cript structure." Robert Fay in his piece 'In Search of the Writer-Diplomat tradition' writes- "India continues to maintain this venerable tradition, with poet Abhay *ar serving in recent years as the Indian Amb*ador to Madagascar and Comoros."

Abhay K and Eleanor Catton at JLF 2015

Abhay *ar's poems have appeared in several magazines and literary journals including Poetry Salzburg Review, The Asia Literary Review, Gargoyle, and The Caravan. His poems have also been included in a number of anthologies including A Poem A Day edited by Gulzar (HarperCollins|2020), The Younger Indian Poets edited by Sudeep Sen(Sahitya Akademi|2019), 100 Great Indian Poems (Bloomsbury|2018), and The Himalayan Arc edited by Namita Gokhale (HarperCollins|2018). Abhay has read his poems at major poetry and literature festivals across the globe.

Editor

CAPITALS

In 2017, CAPITALS, an anthology of poems on the capital cities of the world edited by Abhay K., was released. It brought poets together from across the planet and included contributions from Derek Walcott, Vijay Seshadri, George Szirtes, and Ruth Padel among other prominent poets from 185 countries.

100 Great Indian Poems

100 Great Indian Poems (2018) is an anthology of Indian poetry edited covering over 3000 years of Indian poetry and 28 Indian languages. It has been translated and published into Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Malagasy and Arabic.It has also been translated into French, Russian and Nepali, which will be published soon.

New Brazilian Poems

This anthology selected, edited and translated by Abhay K. contains the works of 60 contemporary Brazilian poets.

100 More Great Indian Poems

It is a sequel of 100 Great Indian Poems and was published in 2019 by Bloomsbury India.

The Bloomsbury Anthology of Great Indian Poems

It is a collection of 200 Great Indian Poems edited by Abhay K. and published in 2020.

The Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems

He has also edited The Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems sweeping through three millennia and over two dozen Indian languages.

The Book of Bihari Literature

It is a first anthology of its kind edited by Abhay K. which brings together poems and short stories from ten languages of Bihar spanning over 3000 years into English translation.It will be published in October 2022 by HarperCollins India.

Lyricist

In 2013 Abhay released Earth Anthem, a song intended as an anthem for the planet Earth, written by him and translated into eight languages including six official UN languages – Arabic, Chinese, French, English, Russian and Spanish – as well as Hindi and Nepali. It was set to music by Sapan Ghimire and sung by Shreya Sotang from Nepal. It has been translated into over 130 languages. On World Environment Day 2017, Abhay K's Earth Anthem composed by L. Subramaniam and sung by Kavita Krishnamurthy was released in Brasilia. A New video of Earth Anthem was released on 22 April 2020 to mark the 50th anniversary of the Earth Day. Over 100 eminent artists from across the world came together to read Earth Anthem to mark 51st anniversary of Earth Day on 22 April 2021. Abhay also wrote an anthem for the South Asian *ociation for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) in an attempt to foster South Asian consciousness and bring the member states of SAARC together. It has spurred discussions on the need for an official SAARC Anthem. He is the first Indian poet invited to record his poems at the Library of Congress. He was given the epithet of 'World Poet' by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Vijay Seshadri He wrote Moon Anthem to mark the landing of Chandrayaan 2 on the Moon, which has been composed by Dr. L. Subramaniam and sung by Kavita Krishnamurthy. He has penned anthems on all the planets in the solar system.

Artist

Recipients of SAARC Literary Award 2013 Citation of SAARC Literary Award to poet-diplomat Abhay K

Abhay's art work focus on planetary consciousness. He has exhibited his paintings in St. Petersburg, Paris, New Delhi and Brasilia. Poetry-paintings of Abhay K and Italian artist Tar*o exhibited at the National Academy of Art, New Delhi highlight Delhi's glorious past.

Awards and recognition

• 2012: 1st Prize by the Amity School of Business, Noida, India for the case study Digital Revolution and Business at the 8th Renvoi, an International Management Case Study Compe*ion
• 2012: Nominated for the Pushcart Prize
• 2013: SAARC Literary Award - Foundation of SAARC Writers and Literature
• 2014: Asia-Pacific Excellence Award

Works

Poetry Books

• Enigmatic Love:: Love poems from Moscow (Bookwell|2009)
• Fallen Leaves of Autumn (ArtXpress|2010)
• Candling the Light(Yash|2011)
• Remains (HarAnand|2012)
• The Seduction of Delhi(Bloomsbury|2014)
• The Eight-eyed Lord of Kathmandu (Bloomsbury India |2018) & (The Onslaught Press, Oxford & Paris|2017)
• The Prophecy of Brasilia (Bilingual edition in English and Portuguese| GaNa, Brazil|2018)
• The Alphabets of Latin America: A Carnival of Poems (Bloomsbury India |2020)
• The Magic of Madagascar (Bilingual edition in French and English|L'Harmattan, Paris|2021)
• Monsoon (Sahitya Akademi, India, 2022)
• Celestial (f/c 2022)

Translated

• Uttering Her Name by Gabriel Rosenstock (Salmon Ireland) into Hindi|2015
• Meghaduta by Kalidasa into English (Bloomsbury|2021)
• Ritusamhara by Kalidasa into English (Bloomsbury|2021)

Edited

• Anthology of Contemporary Indian English Poetry (Enchanting Verses Literary Review|2016)
• CAPITALS (Bloomsbury|2017)
• 100 Great Indian Poems (Bloomsbury|2017)
• 100 More Great Indian Poems (Bloomsbury India|2019)
• The Bloomsbury Anthology of Great Indian Poems (Bloomsbury India|2020)
• New Brazilian Poems (Ibis Libris|2019)
• The Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems (Bloomsbury|2020)
• The Book of Bihari Literature (HarperCollins|2022)

Non-fiction

• River Valley to Silicon Valley (Bookwell|2007), republished as Becoming A Civil Servant (Kalinjar|2015)
• 10 Questions of the Soul (2010)
• Colours of Soul (Cvet Dushi) (2011)

Research Work on Poetry of Abhay K.

A PhD on "Cultural Construct of Self: A Critical Study of Abhay *ar's Poetry" was awarded by Maharaja Ganga Singh University, Bikaner, Rajasthan, India to Amit Dhawan in 2017. Academician Sapna Dogra has written a research paper comparing 'A River'of A.K. Ramanujan and 'Yamuna' of Abhay K.

• Approaching Abhay K.'s The Seduction of Delhi: A Study of Major Themes
• A.K. Ramanujan's 'A River' and Abhay K's 'Yamuna': River as a Symbol of Endless Flow of Meanings

Quotes

• "Whatever be our individual, social or other interests, we should not forget that we have only one cosmic home, Earth."-Abhay K.
• "We are humans, Earth is our home." - Abhay K.
• "I was never born, I didn't die."- Abhay K.
• "United we stand as flora and fauna, united we stand as species of one Earth."- Abhay K.
• "There is no greater joy in life than the joy of creating something."- Abhay K.
• "Poetry is an intrinsic need of our species."- Abhay K.
• "All the people and all the nations, one for all and all for one." -Abhay K.

See also

• Poetry portal

• Indian English Poetry
• List of Indian poets in English
• Indian Foreign Service
• Poet-diplomat

References

External links

• Abhay K.'s interview to The Diplomat, Asia Pacific
• Abhay K.'s recording of his poems at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.
• A diplomat is taking Indian poetry to the world through translations of a hundred ‘ great poems’ Scroll.in
• In search of the Writer-Diplomat tradition RobertFay.com
• How an Indian diplomat created an anthology of poetry on the world’s capitals Scroll.in
• The Sage Indian of Brasilia: Chandrahas Choudhury profiles Abhay K. Mint Lounge
• A Journey of thoughts with Abhay K on India's National Channel DD National
• Poetry reading at Jaipur Literature Festival 2015 Poetry 24x7 Start at 9 MinJaipur Literature Festival
• Of poetry and p*ports, The Hindu