Cuttack: Internationally acclaimed poet and litterateur, Jayanta Mahapatra passed away on Sunday while undergoing treatment at the SCB Medical College and Hospital in Cuttack. He was 95.
Mahapatra was suffering from pneumonia and was undergoing treatment at SCBMCH.
The octogenarian poet was conferred the Padma Shri in 2009 for his contribution to literature. However, he returned the award in 2015 protesting against the much-debated and rising intolerance in the country.
In 1981, he became the first Indian poet writing in English to win the Sahitya Akademi award.
The name of his first collection of poems is Svayamvara and Other Poems(1971) followed by other collections like Close the Sky Ten by Ten(1971), A Father’s Hours(1976), A Rain of Rites(1976), Waiting(1979), Life Signs(1983), A Whiteness of Bone(1992), Shadow Space(1997), Bare Face(2000), Random Descent among others.
Bborn on 22nd October, 1928 to a lower middle class family of Lemuel Mahapatra and Sudhansa Mahapatra, Jayanta Mahapatra began his early formal education in an English medium school named Stewart School at Cuttack.
He completed his masters in Physics and started his profession as a teacher in 1949. He served in various Government colleges of Orissa and retired from his job as a teacher in 1986.
Mahapatra began writing poetry at the age of thirty-eight, quite late as compared to other poets. His name is included among the three founders of Indian English poetry, the other two being A.K Ramanujan and Nissim Ezekiel.
The collection of his poems in Oriya is Bali (1993), Kahibi Gotii Katha (1995), Baya Raja (1997), Tikil Chhayee (2001), Chali (2006), and Jadiba Gapatiayy (2009). Mahapatra had also translated in English from Oriya and Bengali.
Some of his translated works include Countermeasures: Poems (1973), Wings of the Past: Poems (1976), Verticals of Life: Poems (1996), Discovery and the Other Poems (2001), and A Time of Rising (2003).
Jayanta Mahapatra has been showered with many prestigious awards for his appraised works in the field of literature. He has been awarded Jacob Glatstein Memorial Award (1975), Allen Tate Prize (2009), SAARC literary Award for the year 2009, Padma Shree Award (2009). In the same year he has also been awarded an honorary doctorate by Ravenshaw University on 2nd May. Jayanta Mahapatra is the first Indian English Poet to receive the Sahitya Academi Award in the year 1981.
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