Janani Ambikapathy was born and raised in Chennai. She got her PhD in English at the University of Cambridge where she worked on translations of the French-Egyptian poet Edmond Jabès. Her essays and poems have been published in Modernism/Modernity, Hopscotch Translation, Modern Poetry in Translation, Lana Turner, Datableed, The Rialto, and Visual Verse amongst others. Her pamphlet If Not Theirs is forthcoming from Veer2 in January 2023. She is currently translating the Akkananuru, an anthology of classical Tamil poems.