Udaya Narayana Singh is Tagore Professor, Rabindra Bhavana, Visva-Bharati; Director, Indira Gandhi Centre for National Integration (IGCNI); and former Director, Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysore. He is a renowned linguist as well as a reputed poet, playwright and essayist in Maithili and Bengali. He set up the Centre for Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies (CALTS), the Centre for Distance Education and the Study India Program (SIP) at the University of Hyderabad, and has taught at the Universities of Delhi, Baroda and Surat. As a creative writer, he has published four collections of poems and twelve plays in Maithili (he writes under the penname ‘Nachiketa'), and six books of literary essays and two volumes of poetry in Bengali, besides translating several books. His recent authored volumes include an anthology of poems in Maithili—Madhyampurush Ekvachan (2005), which has been translated and published in English (with Rizio Yohannan Raj, 2006), Tamil (2008) and German (2009); a play in Maithili—No Entry: Maa Pravisha (2008); a collection of one-acts—Priyamvadaa aa anya ekaankii (2008) in Maithili; a collection of nonsense rhymes—Khaam-kheyaali (2003) in Bengali; and India Writes: A Story of Linguistic and Literary Plurality (2006). Presently, he is the Chief Editor of the State-of-the-art Maithili bi-monthly, Mithila Darshan. Professor Singh has also edited/co-edited many volumes, and contributed numerous chapters to edited volumes and articles to journals. His most recent edited volumes include Culturation: Essays in Honour of Jawaharlal Handoo (2001); Linguistic Landscaping in India (jointly with N. H. Itagi 2002); and Language, Society and Culture (jointly with N. H. Itagi and S. K. Singh, 2004). He has been the chief editor of the journal, Indian Linguistics, and general editor of the ‘Language and Development' series (LAD) from Sage, and of the Longman–CIIL series of bilingual dictionaries from Pearson (forthcoming). He has also been the mentor or chair of several interesting academic projects, including the Linguistic Data Consortium for Indian Languages (LDC-IL), National Testing Service (NTS), National Translation Mission (NTM), and CIIL's Bhasha Mandakini series of documentation. Under the last project, Professor Singh has designed and created 545 short films in English on teaching of Bangla, Tamil, Kannada and Marathi. A poet-invitee at the Frankfurt Book Fair (2006)—India Guest of Honour presentation—and the leader of the Cultural Delegation of Writers to China (2007), Professor Singh has visited and lectured in Bangladesh, the Caribbean, China, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Mauritius, Nepal, Pakistan, Russia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Thailand, the UK and the USA, and has received several grants and honours.