Arun Balkrishna Kolatkar

Arun Balkrishna Kolatkar (Marathi: अरुण बालकृष्ण कोलटकर) (1 November 1932 – 25 September 2004) was an Indian poet who wrote in both Marathi and English. His poems found humour in everyday matters. Kolatkar is the only Indian poet besides Kabir to be featured on the World Classics titles of New York Review of Books. His first collection of English poetry, Jejuri won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1977. His Marathi verse collection Bhijki Vahi won a Sahitya Akademi Award in 2005. An anthology of his works, Collected Poems in English, edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, was published in Britain by Bloodaxe Books in 2010. Trained as an artist from the J. J. School of Art, he was also a graphics designer. Kolatkar was born in Kolhapur, Maharashtra, where his father Tatya Kolatkar was an officer in the Education department. He lived in a traditional patriarchal Hindu extended family, along with his uncle's family. He has described their nine-room house as "a house of cards. Five in a row on the ground, topped by three on the first, and one on the second floor.". The floors had to be "plastered with cowdung every week".