Mani Rao is a poet, translator and independent scholar.

Her poetry collections include Sing to Me (Recent Work Press Australia), New & Selected Poems (Poetrywala India), Echolocation (Math Paper Press Singapore) and Ghostmasters (Chameleon Press Hong Kong). She has two books in translation from Sanskrit including Bhagavad Gita as a poem (Autumn Hill Books USA and Fingerprint India), and Kalidasa for the 21st Century Reader (Aleph Books India). Her latest book Living Mantra— Mantra, Deity and Visionary Experience Today (Palgrave Macmillan 2019) is an anthropology of mantra-experience among tantric practitioners in south India.

“Rao’s version of the Bhagavad Gita unpacks the original Sanskrit with a range of avant-garde techniques—with regards to prosody, diction, mise-en-page and lineation—rendering a new translation of the well-known philosophical text unlike any before it.” — The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry, 2013.

Read more on Wikipedia