Manohar Shetty (born 1953) is a Goa-based poet considered one of the prominent Indian poets writing in the English language.
Manohar Shetty was born in Bombay and educated in Panchgani. He graduated from Bombay University in 1974 and began working as a journalist.
He has been a Senior Fellow with the Sahitya Akademi, the Indian Academy of Arts and Letters, and his work is found in several anthologies, including The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and anthologies edited by Eunice de Souza, Vilas Sarang, and Jeet Thayil.
Shetty’s poetry is seen as being an integral part of the “chronology of modern Indian English poetry.” His poetry is described as reveling in “the celebration of the somber” and being filled with “sepulchral images” while their “mood is predominantly one of helplessness and lethargy.”
Shetty is listed in Sudeep Sen’s essay “New Indian Poetry: The 1990s Perspective”, published in World Literature Today, Vol. 68, No. 2. K. Narayana Chandran of the University of Hyderabad, while reviewing Shetty’s Domestic Creatures in World Literature Today, comments: “To be able to write magnificently about the little world one knows – and what passionate care all this involves – is no small gift for a poet. Manohar Shetty is an eminently gifted poet in this sense.”
In another review of Shetty’s A Guarded Space, in 1982 in the same journal (World Literature Today), S. Amanuddin is more critical. New Delhi-based magazine Caravan described Shetty as “something of a rarity among Indian English poets of his and preceding generations, who have tended to be rather less consistent in their output.”
Picture Credits – https://thepunchmagazine.com/manohar-shetty
