Abhay Kumar

He is an Indian Foreign Service officer and has served in various positions at the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) of the government of India and at the Indian missions and posts abroad in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kathmandu, Brasilia and Antananarivo. At the MEA headquarters in New Delhi he served as the Under Secretary Digital diplomacy and sent the first tweet after setting up an official Twitter account of the Ministry of External Affairs of India in 2010.[19][20] He served as the spokesperson of the Embassy of India, Kathmandu from 2012 to 2015.[21] He was appointed Director of the Nehru Centre, London in March 2015 however he could not take up the assignment.[22][23] Subsequently, he was appointed as India's Deputy High Commissioner to Australia in August 2015 however could not take up the assignment.[24] He served as India's Deputy Chief of Mission to Brazil from 2016-2019 and as India's 21st Ambassador to the Indian Ocean islands of Madagascar[25] and Comoros from 2019-2022. He currently serves as the Deputy Director General of Indian Council of Cultural Relations responsible for cultural events during India's presidency of G-20 from Dec 2022-Nov 2023. He started Indian Foreign Service Day celebrations on 9 Oct in 2011.[26] He also proposed celebration of the International Day of Diplomats on the United Nations Day[27] which was celebrated in Brasilia for the first time on 24 Oct 2017 with the participation of diplomats from several countries.[28] The second International Day was celebrated in Brasilia while the third one was celebrated in Madagascar.[29] The fourth International Day of Diplomats was celebrated globally.[30] The Embassy of India, Antananarivo became the first Indian Embassy to go solar on 2nd Oct 2020 during his tenure as Ambassador of India to Madagascar [31] and to have a Street Library.[32]

Abhay K and Eleanor Catton at JLF 2015

Abhay's first book titled River Valley to Silicon Valley(2007) was a memoir that also contained his first poem, 'Soul Song'.[33] Robert Fay in his piece 'In Search of the Writer-Diplomat tradition' writes- "India continues to maintain this venerable tradition, with poet Abhay Kumar serving in recent years as the Indian Ambassador to Madagascar and Comoros."[34]

Abhay K. and Forrest Gander at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2020

Abhay K, Fady Joudah, Lionel Fogarty, Sadaf Saz, Arjun Deo Charan, Ashok Bajpai at JLF 2015

He has published a dozen collections of poetry:

Love poems from Moscow (Bookwell|2009)[35] In his first collection of poems written during his stay in Moscow, Abhay K. explores various shades of love and mystery associated with this universal emotion.

In his second poetry collection Abhay K. turns to nature to seek solace and explores human-nature relationship.

In his third collection of poems written during his stay in Russia, the poet turns philosophical and deals with existential issues faced by humanity.

In his fourth poetry collection the poet engages with various figures of Russia such as Gogol, Pushkin, Dostoevsky among others and life in St.Petersburg.

In his fifth poetry collection written during his stay in Delhi (2010-2012), Abhay K. takes the readers to a poetic ride across the seven cities of Delhi, introduces them to its people, monuments and history. Poet Jayanta Mahapatra, thinks "qualities of love, tenderness and compassion set Abhay K's work apart from much of the general run of current poetics."[36]

The Eight-Eyed Lord of Kathmandu (2017) is a collection on the UNESCO World Heritage sites, festivals, historical personalities, landscapes and prominent places of Nepal written during his stay in Nepal from 2012 to 2015.[37] It was translated into Nepali by Kishore Nepal as Jatra[38] and in Odia by Monalisa Jena as Ashtanetra.

In his haiku like short poems, Abhay K. creates a poetic portrait of the Brazil's capital city.

Pulitzer Prize winning poet Forrest Gander says about The Alphabets of Latin America(2020)-"Abhay K. has a great sense of lineation, of understatement, of memorable, very particular images, and of manuscript structure."[39]

The Magic of Madagascar is a bilingual (Eng-French) collection of haiku written by Abhay K. during his stay in the Indian ocean island of Madagascar (2019-2022) which introduces the reader to the rich and unique flora and fauna of Madagascar and its warm and friendly people and monuments.

Monsoon is a poem of 150 stanzas of four lines each written by Abhay K. during his stay in Madagascar which follows the path of monsoon from Madagascar to the Himalayas.

Stray Poems is his 11th collection of poems written between 2010-2020, which contain poems such as The Partitioned Land, Diplomacy, Cosmic Anthems among others.

Celestial is a love poem of 100 stanzas of two rhyming lines each which takes the reader on a poetic ride across all the 88 constellations visible from Earth.

Abhay's poems have appeared in several magazines and literary journals including Poetry Salzburg Review,[40] The Asia Literary Review,[41] Gargoyle,[42] and The Caravan.[43] His poems have also been included in a number of anthologies including A Poem A Day edited by Gulzar (HarperCollins|2020), The Younger Indian Poets edited by Sudeep Sen(Sahitya Akademi|2019), 100 Great Indian Poems (Bloomsbury|2018), and The Himalayan Arc edited by Namita Gokhale (HarperCollins|2018). Abhay has read his poems at major poetry and literature festivals across the globe.[44][45][46]

In 2022 he appeared on the podcast, The Literary City with Ramjee Chandran, to talk about his career as a poet diplomat.

In 2017, CAPITALS, an anthology of poems on the capital cities of the world edited by Abhay K., was released. It brought poets together from across the planet and included contributions from Derek Walcott, Vijay Seshadri, George Szirtes, and Ruth Padel among other prominent poets from 185 countries.

100 Great Indian Poems (2018) is an anthology of Indian poetry edited covering over 3000 years of Indian poetry and 28 Indian languages.[47] It has been translated and published into Portuguese,[48] Spanish,[49] Italian,[50][51] Malagasy and Arabic.It has also been translated into French, Russian and Nepali, which will be published soon.[52][53]

This anthology selected, edited and translated by Abhay K. contains the works of 60 contemporary Brazilian poets.

It is a sequel of 100 Great Indian Poems and was published in 2019 by Bloomsbury India.

It is a collection of 200 Great Indian Poems edited by Abhay K. and published in 2020.

He has also edited The Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems sweeping through three millennia and over two dozen Indian languages.[54]

It is a first anthology of its kind edited by Abhay K. which brings together poems and short stories from ten languages of Bihar spanning over 3000 years into English translation. It was published in October 2022 by HarperCollins India.

• Enigmatic Love : Love poems from Moscow (Bookwell|2009)[35]
• Fallen Leaves of Autumn (ArtXpress|2010)[77]
• Candling the Light(Yash|2011)[78]
• Remains (HarAnand|2012)[79]
• The Seduction of Delhi(Bloomsbury|2014)[80]
• The Eight-eyed Lord of Kathmandu (Bloomsbury India |2018) & (The Onslaught Press, Oxford & Paris|2017)[81]
• The Prophecy of Brasilia (Bilingual edition in English and Portuguese| GaNa, Brazil|2018)
• The Alphabets of Latin America: A Carnival of Poems (Bloomsbury India |2020)[82][83]
• The Magic of Madagascar (Bilingual edition in French and English|L'Harmattan, Paris|2021) [84][85]
• Monsoon (Sahitya Akademi, India, 2022)[86]
• Stray Poems (Poetrywala, India, 2022)
• Celestial (Mapin, 2023)

• Uttering Her Name by Gabriel Rosenstock (Salmon Ireland) into Hindi|2015
• Meghaduta by Kalidasa into English (Bloomsbury|2021) [87]
• Ritusamhara by Kalidasa into English (Bloomsbury|2021)

• Anthology of Contemporary Indian English Poetry (Enchanting Verses Literary Review|2016)[88]
• CAPITALS (Bloomsbury|2017)[89]
• 100 Great Indian Poems (Bloomsbury|2017)[90]
• 100 More Great Indian Poems (Bloomsbury India|2019)[91]
• The Bloomsbury Anthology of Great Indian Poems (Bloomsbury India|2020)[92]
• New Brazilian Poems (Ibis Libris|2019)[93]
• The Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems (Bloomsbury|2020)
• The Book of Bihari Literature (HarperCollins|2022)

• River Valley to Silicon Valley (Bookwell|2007), republished as Becoming A Civil Servant (Kalinjar|2015)
• 10 Questions of the Soul (2010)[94]
• Colours of Soul (Cvet Dushi) (2011)[95]