Poet, translator, folklorist, and philologist A.K. Ramanujan was born in Mysore, India. He earned degrees at the University of Mysore and Deccan College in Pune and a PhD from Indiana University. Ramanujan wrote in both English and Kannada, and his poetry is known for its thematic and formal engagement with modernist transnationalism. Issues such as hybridity and transculturation figure prominently in such collections as Second Sight (1986), Selected Poems (1976), and The Striders (1966). The Collected Poems of A.K. Ramanujan (1995) received a Sahitya Akademi Award after the author’s death.

As a scholar, Ramanujan contributed to a range of disciplines, including linguistics and cultural studies. His essay “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?” proposed a notion of “context-sensitive” thinking based on complex situational understandings of identity that differed significantly from Western thought and its emphasis on universal concepts and structures. Context-sensitive thinking influenced Ramanujan as a folklorist as well. His works of scholarship include A Flowering Tree and Other Oral Tales from India (1997)

His first book of poems, The Striders, was published in 1966 by Oxford University Press, and his second volume of poems, Relations, was published again by OUP in 1969. His poems have found a place in many anthologies of Indian English poetry and Commonwealth poetry, and he himself has been discussed in many critical works on the two areas.

Ramanujan taught at the University of Chicago for much of his career, where he helped develop the South Asian studies program. In 1976, the Indian government honoured him with Padma Shri, the fourth-highest civilian award in the country. Ramanujan also received a MacArthur Fellowship. The South Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies awards the A.K. Ramanujan Book Prize for Translation in honour of his contributions to the field.

He is much more well-known as a translator and his The Interior Landscape is a translation of the great Tamil classic Kurunthokai. While this book won a gold medal from the Tamil Writers’ Association, his Speaking of Siva won the National Book Award in 1974. Another well-known translation is Hymns for the Drowning: Poems for Visnu by Nammalvar (1981). His latest work is Second Sight (1986), a set of poems very different from the earlier poems both in content and form.