Sitakant Mahapatra

Sitakant Mahapatra (1937) is a major voice in modern Indian poetry. He has fourteen anthologies of his poems. They have been translated and published in all the Indian Languages. Anthologies of his poems have also been published in English and several European languages. A social anthropologist of repute, Dr. Mahapatra has translated and edited nine anthologies of the oral poetry of Indian tribes. He has been a senior Homi Bhabha fellow and a fellow at the Universities of Cambridge and Harvard. He has received numerous awards including the Bharatiya Jnanpith Award (1993), Sahitya Akademi Award (1974), Kumaran Asan Poetry Award, Orissa Sahitya Akademi Award, Soviet Land Nehru Award, Viswa Hindi Sammelan Award and recently the Kabir Samman. Dr. Mahapatra was educated at Utkal, Allahabad and Cambridge Universities and has a doctorate in Social Anthropology from Utkal, India. A member of the Indian Administrative Service, he served as Orissa Government’s Secretary and also as a Secretary with the Government of India for several years. He was the President of UNESCO’s Inter-Governmental Committee for the World Decade for Cultural Development (1994-96) and is currently Chairman of the National Book Trust (NBT), India. He lives with his family in Bhubaneswar, Orissa, India.