Ajay Kumar, a 23-year old student of English Literature, is the winner of the 2024 Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize. He was selected from among 66 competitors this year by the Mumbai-based poet, Menka Shivdasani and two faculty members of the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad who constituted the jury. Neethu Krishnan, Aparna Chivukula, and Nikita Parikh have been shortlisted and received special mention from the jury.
Ajay Kumar, a Chennai-based poet, is the author of the e-chapbook, ‘balancing acts’ (Yavanika Press, 2023) and has published his poems in The Bombay Literary Magazine, Rattle, The Bombay Review, Usawa, ASAP Art, gulmohur, The Alipore Post, nether, The Bangalore Review, Muse India, The Chakkar, and The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English, among others. He was longlisted for the Toto Funds the Arts Creative Writing Award in 2023. He has a Masters in Literary and Cultural Studies from EFLU, Hyderabad, and is currently working on the manuscript of his first poetry collection.
Recognised as a significant award for creative writing in India, the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize was instituted by the Hyderabad-based Srinivas Rayaprol Literary Trust to recognize excellence in poetry written in English by poets in the age group of 20-40 years. The Prize is jointly administered by the Department of English, University of Hyderabad.
The inaugural prize was awarded in 2009 to Aditi Machado and, subsequently, to Hemant Mohapatra (2010), Aditi Rao (2011), Tushar Jain (2012), Mihir Vatsa (2013), Ranjani Murali (2014), Aishwarya Iyer (2015), Goirick Brahmachari (2016), Debarshi Mitra (2017), Poorna Swami (2018), Prashant Parvataneni (2019), Satya Dash (2020), Pervin Saket (2021), Syam Sudhakar (2022) and Nikita Deshpande (2023). Eminent poets like Jeet Thayil, Sudeep Sen, Keki Daruwalla, Arundhathi Subramanian, Manohar Shetty, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Ranjit Hoskote, E.V. Ramakrishnan, Gieve Patel, Mamang Dai, Vinay Dharwadker, Mani Rao and Sridala Swami have previously been associated with the prize as jury members.
This 16th Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize, consisting of a citation and cash prize of Rs. 15,000, will be presented to the winner at the Hyderabad Literary Festival in January 2025.