Vidyan Ravinthiran's Avidya Featured on Guardian's Best Poetry Books List

Avidya by Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of the Humanities VIdyan Ravinthiran was included on The Guardian's list of the best poetry books of 2025. Congratulations, Vidyan!

An excerpt from the article is included below: 

"Many of 2025’s most notable collections have been powered by a spirit of wild experimentation, pushing at the bounds of what “poetry” might be thought to be. Sarah Hesketh’s 2016 (CB Editions) is a fabulous example: it takes 12 interviews with a variety of anonymous individuals about the events of that year and presents fragments of the transcripts as prose poems. The cumulative effect of these voices is haunting and full of pathos, as 'they vote for whoever, and their life stays exactly the same'...

Pipping it to the Forward prize for best collection this year were two books, the first time the prize has rewarded two winners. Karen Solie’s Wellwater (Picador) doesn’t just decry environmental catastrophe, it also focuses its gaze on the underlying economics that have brought us to this point. Her tone is refreshing, offering comfort only through its clarity: 'Under the darkest night skies on Earth / an explanation is not forthcoming.' The other winner, Avidyā by Vidyan Ravinthiran (Bloodaxe), draws on the poet’s travels to the north of Sri Lanka, where his family are from, and his move to the US. As poems of journeys, they put me in mind at times of James Fenton, while Ravinthiran’s immersion in the English canon means linguistic delights throughout – 'rivering, glitch-thronged, dubitable … belied, / believed, beloved'."

Read more here.