R. Raj Rao is Reader in the Department of English, University of Poona. His doctorate involved a comparative study of the writing of Whitman and Tagore. In 1990 he was awarded a Nehru Centenary Fellowship to pursue postdoctoral studies at the Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick. He is the author of Ten Indian Writers in Interview and editor (with S. Pandey) of Images of India in the Indian Novel in English 1960-1985 (1993).
He is a poet, playwright and short story writer, widely published mainly in Indian journals. His first collection of poetry, Slide Show was published by Peepal Tree in 1993. Praised by David Dabydeen for its fierce scatological energy, it is one of the first literary works by an Indian writer to explore the personas of transgressive sensibilities (‘Confessions of a boy lover’ and ‘Self Portrait’ [‘I’m a Yahoo in sex...’]).
