
Born in 1969, Ranjit Hoskote is a Mumbai-based poet, art theorist, and independent curator. He is also an assistant editor for The Hindu.
Hoskote’s poetry—influenced by diverse writers from Wallace Stevens to Eugenio Montale, from Agah Shahid Ali to Bhartrihari (Indian author of the Vakyapadiya)—is intellectually rigorous and highly sophisticated work. His first collection of poetry, Zones of Assault was published in New Delhi in 1971. His second collection, The Cartographer’s Apprentice (with drawings by Laxman Shreshtha) was published in 2000 in Mumbai, as was his third book, The Sleepwalker’s Archive in 2001. He also edited an anthology of Indian poetry, Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets, published by Viking/Penguin Books India; he also has co-translated the work of poet Vasant Dahake.
Hoskote was a Fellow of the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa (1995); he received the Sanskriti Award for Literature, 1996, and won the British Council/Poetry Society All-India Poetry Competition, 1997, and held a writing residency at the Villa Waldberta, near Munich. His books of art criticism include Pilgrim, Exile, Sorcerer: The Painterly Evolution of Jehangir Sabavala and The Complicit Observer: Reflections on the Art of Sudhir Patwardhan.
BOOKS OF POETRY:
Zones of Assault (New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 1991); The Cartographer’s Apprentice [with drawings by Laxman Shreshtha] (Mumbai: The Pundole Art Gallery, 2000); The Sleepwalker’s Archive (Mumbai: Single File, 2001).