Influential poet and critic, Adil Jehangir Jussawalla, will be the Poet Laureate of the 12th Tata Literature Live! The Mumbai LitFest 2021.

Adil Jussawalla’s many-layered, uncompromising poetry is mainly rooted in the city landscape, describing equally its beauty and degradation, its position as a place of refuge as well as exploitation, and the acceptance and meaning of it as home. He is also renowned for the historical breadth and sweep of his compositions.

One of his best known and oft-quoted poems is Sea Breeze which describes Mumbai as a refuge for those displaced by Partition. The body of his work is contained in three main anthologies: Land’s End, Missing Person, and Trying To Say Goodbye, for the last of which he received the Sahitya Akademi Award.

A graduate of the Universities of Bombay and Oxford and of the prestigious Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, Jussawalla worked for some years in the UK, after which he returned to Mumbai where he was a professor of English at St Xavier’s College and later Literary Editor at several leading Indian publications. Together with his peers Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Arun Kolatkar, and Gieve Patel, he helped establish "Clearing House", a poet's publishing co-operative.

The Tata Group is the title sponsor of Tata Literature Live! The Mumbai LitFest, and the festival will also be supported by a few other Tata companies. The festival was conceived by Anil Dharker (1947-2021), founder and festival director of Literature Live!

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