Bangalore-born Vijay Seshadri has won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his work, titled ‘3 Sections’.
Columbia University, which administers the Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism, letters, Drama and Music, described Seshadri’s work as “a compelling collection of poems that examine human consciousness, from birth to dementia, in a voice that is by turns witty and grave, compassionate and remorseless”.
The 60-year-old Seshadri, who happens to be an alumnus of Columbia University, teaches poetry and non-fiction writing at New York’s Sarah lawrence College. When he was five, his family migrated to the United States. Seshadri, who grew up in Columbus, where his father taught chemistry at the Ohio State University.
The fifth person of Indian-origin to bag a Pulitzer, Seshadri’s poems, essays and reviews have appeared in The American Scholar, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, the Times Book Review, and in many anthologies, including Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets, Contours of the Heart, Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, and The Best American Poetry 1997 and 2003.
Seshadri, who holds an AB degree from Oberlin College and an MFA from Columbia University, has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, and has been awarded The Paris Review’s Bernard F Conners long Poem Prize and the MacDowell Colony’s Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement.
Seshadri, who lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son, will get the $10,000 prize for a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author. Others nominated as finalists in the poetry category were Morri Creech for “The Sleep of Reason” and Adrian Matejka for “The Big Smoke”.