About Manu Dash
My Story
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Manu Dash-Bio
Manu Dash is a leading Indian bilingual poet, translator, editor and curator of literature festivals. He writes in English as well as in Odia language.
Manu’s more than 40 books ranging from poetry collection to edited anthologies and 8 translation work.
His poetry has been translated into various Indian and oversea languages including, Hindi,Assamese, Kannada, Malayalam, Urdu, German and Slovene. His works received critical acclaim across languages and territory.
Manu started his writing career at the age of 19 and joined a literary group known for writing anti-establishment poetry-anam poetry movement– started in the spiritual city, Puri.
Manu hails from rural village in the Cuttack district of Odisha and later moved around the country for a living and settled in Bhubaneswar, capital and temple city of Odisha.
Started his writing life as an anam poet, Manu engaged in writing poems in English and so far he has two poetry collection in English (Diwali in a Cancer Ward & A Brief History of Silence) which has been rave reviewed across the country. His Odia poetry collections(anamanachasha, AnjuleySamudara Dheu & Kala Harina) bear the eloquent testimony of writing craft.He laid his hand in Odia short story writing too but did not continue after one collection of flash fiction and a story collection (JaneAtankabadi Sahi Gotie Sandhya &Kandhei Nacha). He also wrote five radio plays, and one stage play in Odia which are yet to be published in book.
He has edited periodical and anthologies in English(TheDhauli Review&anam) and Odialanguage (Chera).
Besides, he has translated from Odia to English Minister’s Share(Shantanu Kumar Acharya) andfrom other language to Odia including Bagha( Kedarnath Singh), JhipiJhipiBarsa(Gulzar), Shakuntala(Namita Gokhale), Manisha Pari Nacha( MaheshDattani) and Mohan Das( Uday Prakash)AauKchhiBakya( Udayan Vajpeyi).
He has a publishing enterprise called Dhauli Books which has a long list of many great authors like K Satchdananda, Hoshang Merchant, Amit Choudhury, Geetanjali Shree, Banu Mushtaq, Perumal Murgan, Jerry Pinto, Anees Salim, Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih , Annie Zaidi, Rajeev Naik and many others.
Manu has been invited to important literature festivals including Jaipur Literature Festival, Bangalore Literature Festival, Matrubhumi International Festival of Letters, Bangalore Poetry festival, Nalanda Literature Festival, Banaras Literature Festival, Calicut Book Festival.He has been curating Odisha Art & Literature Festival (OALF) since 2016 and authors from 35 countries have participated.He has also directed Puri Literature Festival.
His major contributions are three books he has edited recently: Rebati , the first Odia story, translated into 36 languages, Anam Kabya Andolan, a treatise on a forgotten literary movent in the canon of Odia poetry and The Big Book of Odia Literature, a one-off anthology in Odia literature since the formation of Odisha in 1936.