Jayanta Mahapatra, iconic poet, no more

Bhubaneswar, August 27

Eminent poet Jayanta Mahapatra has passed away at a hospital in Odisha’s Cuttack, his family members said. He was 95. Mahapatra, admitted for treatment of pneumonia, breathed his last on Sunday night.

Born in Cuttack on October 22, 1928, Mahapatra was the first Indian poet to win the Sahitya Akademi award for English poetry. He was also conferred with the Padma Shri in 2009. However, he returned it in 2015 to protest against the “rising intolerance in India”.

The author of Indian Summer and Hunger — considered as classics in modern Indian English literature — Mahapatra penned 27 books of poems, of which seven are in Odia language and the rest in English.