Career
All his working life, he taught physics at various colleges in Orissa including Gandhar Meher College, Sambalpur, B.J.B College Bhubanewar, Fakir Mohan College, Balasore and Ravenshaw College, Cuttack. He retired in 1986.
Mahapatra has authored 16 books of poems. His poetry volumes include Relationship, Bare Face and Shadow Space. Mahapatra is a Sahitya Akademi awardee, and also a recipient of the Jacob Glatstein award conferred by Poetry magazine, Chicago. He was also awarded the Allen Tate Poetry Prize for 2009 from The Sewanee Review, Sewanee, USA. He received the SAARC Literary Award, New Delhi, 2009. Besides poetry, he has experimented widely with myriad forms of prose. His published books of prose are Green Gardener, an anthology of short stories and Door Of Paper: Essay and Memoirs. Mahapatra is also a distinguished editor and has been bringing out, for many years, a literary magazine, Chandrabhaga, from Cuttack. The magazine is named after Chandrabhaga, a prominent river in Orissa.
He began writing writing poetry when he was into his 40s. The publication of his first book of poems, Svayamvara and Other Poems, in 1971 was followed by the publication of Close The Sky Ten By Ten. One of Mahapatra's better remembered works is the long poem Relationship, for which he the first Indian English poet to win the Sahitya Akademi award in 1981.
He was conferred the Padma Shri in 2009 by the president of India and was awarded an honourary doctorate by Ravenshaw University on 2 May 2009. He was also awarded Litt.D. degree by Utkal University in 2006.
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