The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here

Poetry Book Society Recommendation

Shortlisted for the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection

Shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize 2019

Shortlisted for the Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections 2021

Vidyan Ravinthiran’s second collection is a book of sonnets for his wife. These are love poems that turn analytical, consider the world, and in which the pronoun ‘we’ aspires to stand for a larger community, including (if you like) the readers themselves. Many describe life in northern England for a mixed-race couple, considering both the redemptive force of love and the cultural origins of our discontent.

Brexit; racist and sexist abuse; class; our work-life balance, and our relationship with institutions (be it our employer, or the NHS); taboos surrounding mental health; civil war in Sri Lanka; media representation of minorities; immigrant anxieties: these poems look inward, but also outward. Worrying at the link between society and our private lives, they scorn a politics which would put us in separate boxes. Love, and imagination, may not conquer all, but as recent shocks suggest, ‘we’ must at least try to understand people different from us.

'To commit an entire collection to the sonnet is a brave act. It shows not just trust in one's abilities but also a humility before the form that any kind of success demands. Few have achieved this in many years but The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here offers an object lesson in finding the scope of the modern sonnet, and using it to record the beauty, sadness, and complexity of the everyday.' - John Burnside, Chair of Judges, T S Eliot Prize 2019

'Skill meets great tenderness in Vidyan Ravinthiran’s sonnet series The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here. These poems brim with ingenuity and each one is a small feat of linguistic daring. Taking love and wonderment as a broad umbrella, we track the intimacies of a marriage through displays of nationalism, xenophobia, familial distance as well as the every day moments known only between lovers. The reader is invited into the home and imaginations of a husband and wife and feels that they are less interloper than celebrant witnessing an enduring bond—not just theirs but what links us as people inhabiting the same world. As Ravinthiran writes in ‘Union’, “It’s with your love I try to love that stranger / who walked so far to read this page.”' - Sandeep Parmar and Naomi Shihab Nye, Co-Judges for the Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections 2021

'My personal favourite... is Vidyan Ravinthiran’s The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here, a wonderful sonnet sequence which, as its title implies, is a little bit about everything, including wrens and whimbrels.' - Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Sunday Times, reviewing the ten titles shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize 2019.

‘The sonnet can miniaturise whole worlds in 14 lines. Two virtuoso sequences... this year were Mimi Khalvati’s Afterwardness (Carcanet) and Vidyan Ravinthiran’s The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here (Bloodaxe).’ – Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Sunday Times (Best Poetry of 2019)

‘Every poem in Ravinthiran’s second collection is a sonnet addressed to his wife, but here is no lack of variety in topic or tone. From interracial love to Sri Lanka’s civil war, mental health to Brexit, the range itself speaks of the ideal spouse: the person with whom we can talk about absolutely anything.’ – Maria Crawford, Financial Times (Best Poetry Books of the Year 2019)

‘Also on the shortlist [for the Forward Prize for Best Collection] is another collection that approaches divisive politics with humanity and warmth: Vidyan Ravinthiran’s The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here. Formally assured but far from formulaic, this book of sonnets for the poet’s wife is testament, at its best, to the ways in which poetry can reach from the particular to the universal. Moving and inviting in their conversational ease, Ravinthiran’s sonnets stretch from the grounding details of life for a mixed-race couple in England today… to thoughtfully touch on themes of identity, class, work and community.’ – Ben Wilkinson, The Guardian

‘…Ravinthiran’s second collection is a sequence of loose, warm love sonnets to his wife… The outside world leaks through in nods to Brexit and his Sri Lankan family, Larkin and Borges, Super Mario and The X-Files.’ – Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph

'These poets are all, in their own ways, political. Race, the body, feminism, gender, the environment, identity, state violence – all these subjects are explored in different ways. Their work pushes at the edges of what a book of poems can be. To read their words is to be brought tidings of the fragile, fraught times we live in that the language of the news bulletins cannot quite convey.' - Guardian editorial on some of the books up for the 2019 Forward Prizes for Poetry - including Vidyan Ravinthiran's Best Collection-shortlisted The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here

Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in Leeds, to Sri Lankan Tamils. His first book of poems, Grun-tu-molani (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. His second, The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here (Bloodaxe Books, 2019), won a Northern Writers' Award and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. It was shortlisted for the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize and the 2021 Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. His third collection, Avidya, was published by Bloodaxe in April 2025 and is the joint winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2025. Vidyan Ravinthiran is co-editor with Seni Seneviratne and Shash Trevett of the anthology Out of Sri Lanka (Bloodaxe Books, 2023), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. After teaching at the universities of Cambridge, Durham and Birmingham in the UK, he now teaches at Harvard in the US. He is the author of Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic (Bucknell, 2015), winner of both the University English Prize and the Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism; a collection of essays, Worlds Woven Together (Columbia University Press, 2022); a critical study, Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose (OUP, 2020); and Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir, a fusion of poetry criticism and memoir, which was published in January 2025 by Norton in the USA and by Icon in the UK.