Shirish Pai (15 November 1929लेखिका आणि सामाजिक कार्यकर्त्या शिरीष पै यांचे निधन
– 2 September 2017Marathi poet, activist Shirish Pai passes away
/ref>) was a social worker and a writer from

Maharashtra Maharashtra () is a state in the western peninsular region of India occupying a substantial portion of the Deccan Plateau. It is bordered by the Arabian Sea to the west, the Indian states of Karnataka and Goa to the south, Telangana to th ...

India India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...

. She had written in

Marathi Marathi may refer to: *Marathi people, an Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group of Maharashtra, India **Marathi people (Uttar Pradesh), the Marathi people in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh *Marathi language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Mar ...

and English, primarily the former.

Early life

Shirish was the elder daughter of Acharya Atre. She had a college degree in Law from Government College of Law, Mumbai.

Career

She joined her father's newspaper, ''Maratha'', as a journalist. She was deeply influenced by the Soviet thinking and way of life, and toured the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

and other Eastern Bloc countries. Alongside her father, Shirish played a role in the Samyukta Maharashtra movement.

Writing

She wrote several books, including collections of her poems. She introduced the

haiku is a type of short form poetry that originated in Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases composed of 17 Mora (linguistics), morae (called ''On (Japanese prosody), on'' in Japanese) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern; that include a ''kire ...

form of poetry to

Marathi literature Marathi literature is the body of literature of Marathi, an Indo-Aryan language spoken mainly in the Indian state of Maharashtra and written in the Devanagari and Modi script. History Early history As a written language, Marathi is probably ...

in 1975. She has also translated Japanese haiku into Marathi and English. In a newspaper interview in June 2011 she revealed that she had started writing and composing poems from the time she was in secondary school and received great encouragement from her father in this regard.

Family

Shirish was married to lawyer and journalist Vyankatesh Pai. They have two sons, Rajendra Pai and Vikramaditya Pai who are both lawyers. She resided, and died, in Mumbai.

References

External links

The following web page lists Shirish Pai's books: 1929 births 2017 deaths Marathi-language writers 20th-century Indian women writers Writers from Pune 20th-century Indian poets Indian women poets Poets from Maharashtra Women writers from Maharashtra {{India-writer-stub