Samartha Vashishtha is an Indian poet writing in English and Hindi, his mothertongue. He has published two volumes of poems in English — Anhadnad, a collection of his childhood poems in the year 2000, and Shadows Don't Live in Walls in 2004. In 2017, Rajkamal Prakashan, the leading publisher of literature in Hindi, released his third book of poems, Sapne Mein Piyaa Panee. . He won a Poetry Chain-Poetry Society Annual Poetry Prize in 2003 for his poem-sequence, Simla. Samartha has also contributed to prominent Indian literary journals. His work in English has appeared in Chandrabhaga edited by Jayanta Mahapatra, Sahitya Akademi's Indian Literature, The Journal of Literature and Aesthetics, The Journal of the Poetry Society and Poetry Chain. His poems in Hindi have appeared in Pahal, an influential literary magazine brought out by Gyanaranjan from Jabalpur, Naya Gyanodaya, Vartaman Sahitya, and Sahitya Akademi's Samakaleen Bharatiya Sahitya besides several other publications.
Translation
Samartha is a co-translator of Soumitra Mohan's long Hindi poem, Luqman Ali into English. The translation was published in Chandrabhaga 14/2007 and then in Asymptote. Luqman Ali is widely considered a landmark poem in Hindi literature, and Samartha's co-translation of it made it accessible to a new generation of readers. In the foreword to his volume of collected poems, आधा दिखता वह आदमी, Soumitra Mohan acknowledges the role of this translation in introducing Luqman Ali to an international readership. Samartha has also translated the poetry of Langston Hughes into Hindi, and the works of Paash, Vyomesh Shukla and Asad Zaidi into English. He continues to work across three languages — English, Hindi and Punjabi — consistently striving to build bridges between their literatures.
Samartha was born in 1983 into a literary family. His grandfather, Prof. Khushi Ram Vashishtha, was a poet of repute in the Indian state of Haryana. In 1968, Prof. Vashishtha was bestowed with the honorary title of Rajya Kavi ; the first of the only two poets to ever earn this title. Samartha's father, Dr Jitendra Vashishtha, a renowned poet himself, published three volumes of poems in his lifetime, and left behind several unpublished manuscripts in the wake of his untimely death. Shailendra Shail, noted Hindi poet and memoirist, is Samartha's paternal uncle. Samartha lives in Noida, India. For over a decade, he worked with Adobe Systems, where he led the user-assistance content activities for Photoshop, earning the informal title of "Chief Content Wrangler" on the credits splash screen for the 19.x releases. After a year long stint with Expedia Group in Gurgaon, he is now a full-time Content Design Manager at Atlassian Bengaluru. He is married to Ashu Vashishtha. They have a daughter.
