Arvind Krishna Mehrotra was born in Lahore in 1947 and grew up in Allahabad and Bhilai. While a student at the University of Allahabad he, along with two friends, started damn you / a magazine of the arts. Later, in Bombay, he edited ezra and brought out mimeographed pamphlets from the ezra-fakir press, one of them, in 1966, his own Howl-inspired poem, bharatmata: a prayer. Along with Adil Jussawalla, Arun Kolatkar, Gieve Patel, and Eunice de Souza, he has come to be known as one of the so-called Bombay Poets. The author of six collections of poems, he is the editor of, among other books, The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets, A History of Indian Literature in English, and Collected Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar, and the translator of The Absent Traveller: Prakrit Love Poetry, Songs of Kabir (NYRB Classics), and (with Sara Rai) Blue Is Like Blue, the stories of Vinod Kumar Shukla. His two volumes of essays are Partial Recall: Essays on Literature and Literary History and Translating the Indian Past. He taught for many years at the University of Allahabad and lives in Dehra Dun.
