Arun Balkrishna Kolatkar (1 November 1932 – 25 September 2004) was an Indian poet[1] who wrote in both Marathi and English.

Kolatkar is the only Indian poet other than Kabir to be featured on the World Classics titles of New York Review of Books.

An anthology of his works, Collected Poems in English, edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, was published in Britain by Bloodaxe Books in 2010.

By the mid-60s he was established as a graphic artist and joined an eclectic group of creatives headed by the legendary advertising professional Kersy Katrak.

His Marathi poetry collections include: Kolatkar was among a group of post-independence bilingual poets who fused the diction of their mother tongues along with international styles to break new ground in their poetic traditions; others in this group included Gopalakrishna Adiga (Kannada), Raghuvir Sahay (Hindi), Dilip Chitre (also Marathi), Sunil Gangopadhyay, Malay Roy Choudhury (Bengali), etc.

Along with friends like Dilip Chitre, he was caught up in the modern shift in Marathi poetry, which was pioneered by B. S. Mardhekar.

While the answer is part rebuff, the list is indicative of the wide, fragmented sources he may have mined, and is worth quoting in full: Kolatkar was hesitant about bringing out his English verse, but his very first book, Jejuri, had a wide impact among fellow poets and littérateurs like Nissim Ezekiel and Salman Rushdie.

It is a typical Kolatkar narrative poem like Droan, mixing myth, allegory, and contemporary history.

While Jejuri was about the agonized relationship of a modern sensitive individual with the indigenous culture, the Kala Ghoda poems[20] are about the dark underside of Mumbai's underbelly.

While Jejuri, a very popular place for pilgrimage to a pastoral god, could never become Kolatkar's home, Kala Ghoda is about exploring the baffling complexities of the great metropolis.

While Jejuri can be considered as an example of searching for belonging, which happens to be the major fixation of the previous generation of Indian poets in English, Kala Ghoda poems do not betray any anxieties and agonies of 'belonging'.

With Kala Ghoda Poems, Indian poetry in English seems to have grown up, shedding adolescent 'identity crises' and goose pimples.

The remarkable maturity of poetic vision embodied in the Kala Ghoda Poems makes it something of a milestone in Indian poetry in English.

After his death, a new edition of the hard to obtain Jejuri was published in the New York Review Books Classics series with an introduction by Amit Chaudhuri (2006).

His Collected Poems in English, edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, was published in Britain by Bloodaxe Books in 2010.