K Satchidanandan (b. 1946) is a bilingual poet, critic, playwright, editor, fiction writer and travel writer. He has been a professor of English and of Translation Studies, editor of Indian Literaturebimonthly  and Beyond Borders, a SAARC literature quarterly, the executive head of the National Academy of Letters, invited National fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla. He has 32 collections of poetry in Malayalam, besides 39 collections in other languages including Arabic, Irish, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese besides all major Indian languages. He has won 64 literary awards – including the National Academy award, Poet Laureate Award from Tata Literature Festival, Bombay, Kanhaiyalal Sethia Memorial Poetry Awards from Jaipur Litfest, five awards in five genres from Kerala Sahitya Akademi besides the topmost awards for poetry and total literary contribution from Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa and Maharashtra. He has read his poetry and lectured at several festivals and book fairs in over 30 countries in six continents and translated poetry from across the world. He has also edited dozens of books in Malayalam and English besides several journals. His latest books of poetry in English include While I Write(Harper-Collins), Misplaced Objects and Other Poems (Indian National Academy), The Missing Rib, Not Only the Oceans (Poetrywala, Bombay),  and Questions from the Dead (CopperCoin, Delhi). His selected essays on Indian literature, Positions, was published by Niyogi Books, Delhi, in 2020 and a collection of resistance writing, Words Matter and Singing in the Dark, a global anthology (ed. with Nishi Chawla) were published by Penguin-Random House, India. K. Satchidanandan is now Fellow and President of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi.