Rati Saxena

Rati SAXENA (poet, translator, vedic scholar; India) is the author of 11 collections of poetry written in Hindi and English, a travelogue, Cheenti ke par, a memoire, Everything is Past Tense, and a critical piece on the famous Malayalam poet Balamaniyamma’s work. Her research on the Atharvaveda has been published as “The Seeds of the Mind,” a fresh approach to the study of Atharvaveda, under the fellowship of the Indira Gandhi National Center for Arts. Saxena’s work appears in translation in Malayalam, Irish, Italian, and English, and she has been invited for poetry readings at festivals around the world, including PoesiaPresente (Monza, Italy), Struga Poetry Evening (Macedonia), twice at the prestigious poetry festival in Medellin (Colombia), and International House of Stavanger (Norway).   She has been the only Indian participant at some of these festivals, including Iran’s Fajr Poetry Festival, 4th international Eskisehir Poetry Festival, and in China’s Moon Festival. Saxena has also appeared as an invited guest speaker at several American universities due to her expertise on vedic poetry.

Saxena also works as a poetry festival director and editor (Kritya) and translator, having translated many Malayalam works of prose and poetry into Hindi and several Norwegian languages. She was awarded the Kendriya Sahitya Akademi prize for Translation of the Year (2000). She is one of the three representatives from Asia for World Poetry Movement, which has 37 foundation members around the world. She is the only Indian whose poem has been chosen in a popular book of China – 110 modern poems of the world.