Arun Balkrishna Kolatkar (Marathi: अरुण बालकृष्ण कोलटकर) (1 November 1932 – 25 September 2004) was an Indian poet who wrote in both Marathi and English. His poems found humour in everyday matters. Kolatkar is the only Indian poet other than Kabir to be featured on the World Classics titles of New York Review of Books. His first collection of English poetry, Jejuri won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1977. His Marathi verse collection Bhijki Vahi won a Sahitya Akademi Award in 2005. An anthology of his works, Collected Poems in English, edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, was published in Britain by Bloodaxe Books in 2010. Trained as an artist from the J. J. School of Art, he was also a noted graphics designer. Life Kolatkar was born in Kolhapur, Maharashtra, where his father Tatya Kolatkar was an officer in the Education department. He lived in a traditional patriarchal Hindu extended family, along with his uncle's family. He has described their nine-room house as "a house of cards. Five in a row on the ground, topped by three on the first, and one on the second floor.". The floors had to be "plastered with cowdung every week". He attended Rajaram High School in Kolhapur, where Marathi was the medium of instruction. After graduation in 1949, much against his father's wishes, he joined S. B. College of Arts, Gulbarga, where his childhood friend Baburao Sadwelkar was enrolled. His college years saw a "mysterious phase of drifting and formal as well as spiritual education", and he graduated in 1957. In 1953, he married Darshan Chhabda (sister of well-known painter Bal Chhabda). The marriage was opposed by both families, partly because Kolatkar was yet to sell any of his paintings. His early years in Mumbai were poor but eventful, especially his life as an upcoming artist in the Rampart Row neighborhood, where the Artists' Aid Fund Centre was located. Around this time, he also translated Tukaram into English. This period of struggle and transition has been captured in his Marathi poem 'The Turnaround': Bombay made me a beggar. Kalyan gave me a lump of jaggery to suck. In a small village that had a waterfall but no name my blanket found a buyer and I feasted on plain ordinary water. I arrived in Nasik with peepul leaves between my teeth. There I sold my Tukaram to buy some bread and mince. (translation by Kolatkar)