Vasantha Surya is a writer, translator, poet, and journalist. She has translated novels, short stories, and poetry from and into Tamil. Her translations from Tamil include novels by Cho Dharman, R. Chudamani, Sa. Kandasamy, Vaasanthi, and A. Madhaviah, and A Place to Live, an anthology of contemporary Tamil short fiction. She has translated the poems of Brecht and Rilke from German into Tamil, and a narrative folk poem from Bundeli Hindi into English (The Ballad of Budhni). The Stalk of Time, shortlisted for the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, and A Word Between Us are her two poetry collections in English. Over the last forty years, her investigative articles and reviews, many of them focusing on issues of social and cultural change and education, have appeared in major Indian publications. Her works for children include Mridu in Madras, translated into Tamil by Prema Srinivasan and herself in three volumes as Medraasil Mirudu, and Ramayana, serialized in Chatterbox magazine.