Manu Dash (b.1956) is a reputed Indian bilingual (English and Odia) poet, translator, editor, publisher, playwright and curator of literature festival based in the temple city Bhubaneswar, Odisha. Early life: He joined in Anam poetic movement in Odisha in later part of 1974 at the age of 18.’Anam’ was a strong poetic movement that dared the establishment during the state of emergency and also propagated the relevance of being rooted in one’ own cultural ethos and milieu. This poetic movement had a huge influence on the contemporary literature for its generic principle on the form and content of the poetry and vehemently opposed the maladies that damaged the ancient poetic narrative in the language. Manu’s literary journey began with publication of his maiden poem in 1975 in Asantakali (tomorrow), a popular and reputed magazine published in Kolkata. His first collection of poems, fiction and essays were published in book form since 2000.
He had his education from the premier college and universities like SCS College and Utkal University. Besides, he has written poems in English. His poems have been translated into Hindi, Malayalam, Urdu, Kannada, Assamese, Uzbek, Russian, Slovene, and German. Besides, he has a book in Hindi, German and Russian. Dash has been invited to the major literary festival including Jaipur Literature Festival, Calicut Book Festival, Hyderabad Literature Festival, TATA Literary Festival, and Bengaluru Poetry Festival besides many literary seminars and gatherings. He is the founder Director of Dhauli Books, which won the prestigious "Publishing Next Industry Award for the Best Printed Book of the Year in Indian Languages" in 2018 Dhauli Books has published more than 80 titles including the works of national and internationally reputed author including Amir Or, Namita Gokhale, Udayan Vajpeyi, Prajwal Parajuli, Annie Zaidi, Perumal Murugan, Chandrahas Choudhury, Soumitra Chatterjee and Kamalakant Mohapatra to name a few in the short span of 3 years. Manu lives and works in Bhubaneswar, environmentally clean, culturally rich capital of Odisha.
He organizes a literary festival called ‘Odisha Art & Literature Festval’ each year since 2016 and acclaimed authors from different parts of India and abroad including Austria, Australia, US, Britain, Poland, Hungary, Spain, Uzbekistan, Israel, Denmark, Netherland have participated.