Dilip Chitre

Dilip Purushottam Chitre ( his full name ) (17 September 1938 – 10 December 2009) was one of the foremost Indian poets and critics to emerge in the post Independence India. Apart from being a notable bilingual writer, writing in Marathi and English, he was also a teacher, a painter, a filmmaker and a magazine columnist. Chitre was born in Baroda on 17 September 1938 into a Marathi speaking CKP community. His father Purushottam Chitre used to publish a periodical named Abhiruchi. His grandfather, Kashinath Gupte was an expert on Tukaram and this served as Chitre's introduction to the poet. Chitre's family moved to Mumbai in 1951 and he published his first collection of poems in 1960. He was one of the earliest and the most important influences behind the famous "little magazine movement" of the sixties in Marathi. He started Shabda with Arun Kolatkar and Ramesh Samarth. In 1975, he was awarded a visiting fellowship by the International Writing Programme of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa in the United States. He has also worked as a director of the Indian Poetry Library, archive, and translation centre at Bharat Bhavan, a multi arts foundation. He also convened a world poetry festival in New Delhi followed by an international symposium of poets in Bhopal. He was educated both in Baroda and Mumbai.

After a long bout with cancer, Dilip Chitre died at his residence in Pune on 10 December 2009.