Ashwani Kumar  is a poet, author and professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Widely published, anthologized and translated into several Indian and foreign languages, his major poetry volumes include ‘My Grandfather’s Imaginary Typewriter’, ‘Banaras and the Other’ and ‘Architecture of Alphabets’( in Hungarian). Recently, he has also published ‘Rivers Going Home’, a major anthology of  poetry from Indian languages.   He has  served on the  jury for the Tata Literature Live! fiction  awards   and  co-founded Indian Novels Collective, an initiative to popularize translation of classic novels of Indian languages. He writes a book column in the Financial Express.