Shrikant VermaShrikant Verma (1931-86) was a central figure of the Nai Kavita (new poetry) movement in the Hindi language in the late 1950s and early 1960s. An important innovator, he is now widely acknowledged to be one of the key Indian poets of the 20th Century Born in a smaller North Indian town, he moved to New Delhi in the 1950s, where he became first a journalist, and later, among other things, a member of the Indian parliament and an apparently influential ruling party functionary. He published two collections of short fiction, a novel, a travelogue, literary interviews, essays and five collections of poetry, including Jalsaghar (1973) and Magadh (1984). He was a visitor at the Iowa International Writing Program twice (1970-71 and 1978), and won the Tulsi Puraskar (1976), the Kumaran Asan Award, and the Sahitya Akademi Award (posthumously, for Magadh, in 1987). Read More Read Less