Pritish Nandy

Pritish Nandy (born 15 January 1951) is an Indian poet, painter, journalist, politician, media and television personality, animal activist and film producer. He was member of Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian parliament representing Maharashtra based party Shiv Sena. He has published a number of poetry books in English and translated poems by other writers from Bengali and Urdu into English.

Pritish Nandy was born in Bhagalpur in the state of Bihar in eastern India to a Bengali Christian family. He is the son of Satish Chandra Nandy and Prafulla Nalini Nandy, and brother of Ashis Nandy and Manish Nandy. He was educated at La Martiniere College and, briefly, at Presidency College in Kolkata, where he spent the first 28 years of his life. Nandy's mother was a teacher at La Martiniere Calcutta and subsequently became the school's first Indian vice principal.

Pritish Nandy's first book of poems Of Gods and Olives was published in 1967. Three further volumes followed in the 1960s and a further 14 volumes were published in the 1970s. During the seventies Nandy edited and published a poetry magazine called Dialogue which published many of India's finest poets in English and other languages, in translation. Dialogue also published over forty books of poems, of first time poets as well as famous poets. It became an iconic platform for contemporary Indian poetry, in English and in translation. In July 1981 Nandy was nominated as a Poet Laureate by the World Academy of Arts and Culture at the Fifth World Congress of Poets in San Francisco. Nandy's poem Calcutta If You Must Exile Me is considered a pioneering classic in modern Indian literature.

The Government of India conferred on him the Padma Shri in 1977 for his contribution to Indian literature. He wrote a new book of poems called Again in 2010 after a long hiatus and then, Stuck on 1/Forty in 2012. In 2014, his version of the Isha Upanishad was published.

...
Wikipedia