Indran Amirthanayagam was born in 1960 in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). When eight years old, he moved with his family to London, and at 14 to Honolulu, Hawaii. He began writing in Honolulu.
Indran Amirthanayagam's The Elephants Of Reckoning won the 1994 Paterson Poetry Prize. The poem "Juarez" won the Juegos Florales of Guaymas, Sonora in 2006. He writes poetry and essays in English, Spanish and French. His Spanish collections include El Infierno de los Pajaros and "El Hombre que Recoge Nidos". He has also published Ceylon R.I.P.. The poem "So Beautiful" was broadcast on the PBS series The United States of Poetry. Univision reported on Amirthanayagam's Spanish poems in a news report in August, 1999. His poems have been anthologized in The United States of Poetry, ALOUD: Voices from the Nuyorican Cafe, The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America, The Nuyorasian Anthology, Black Lightning, Living in America, The Four Way Reader #1. Poems have also been published in Grand Street, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Exquisite Corpse,Hanging Loose, BOMB and elsewhere in the U.S. Poems written originally in French and Spanish have been published in Côte d'Ivoire and Mexico. His "The Splintered Face Tsunami Poems" has just been published by Hanging Loose Press. His translations of Mexican poet Manuel Ulacia were included in Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry. Translations of Jose Eugenio Sanchez have been published on line. A bilingual edition of Ceylon R.I.P. will be published in Mexico in 2010. Two other Spanish collections and a collection of poems about Sri Lanka are under preparation. Amirthanayagam will participate in the Medellin Poetry Festival in 2010.
He is a diplomat in the U,S. Foreign Service, based currently in Lima, Peru.