Vijay Nambisan was a poet, writer of non-fiction, critic, journalist and translator. He won the first All India Poetry Competition (organised by the Poetry Society of India and the British Council) in 1990 with his poem ‘Madras Central’, and his debut collection, Gemini—ashared edition with Jeet Thayil, and introduced by Dom Moraes—was published two years later. His second collection, First Infinities, appeared in 2015. In between, he published two acclaimed non-fiction books, Bihar is the Eye of the Beholder (2000) and Language as an Ethic (2003), as well as Two Measures of Bhakti (2009), comprising translations of the devotional poetry of Poonthanam and Melpathur Narayana Bhattathiri. Vijay Nambisan was married to the novelist and surgeon Kavery Nambisan, with whom he spent several years in rural and small-town Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Maharashtra and Karnataka.