Laxmi Prasad Devkota

Laxmi Prasad Devkota (1909–1959) is Nepal's greatest poet, honoured with the title Mahakavi ("Great Poet") and often compared to the Romantics for the lyricism, passion and imagination he brought to the Nepali language. His epic ballad Muna Madan — the story of a man who leaves his wife to seek his fortune in Tibet, and the price that separation extracts from both of them — remains the most beloved single work in Nepali literature, cherished across generations for its simple folk metre and universal emotion.

Born in Kathmandu, Devkota was a tireless experimenter: he wrote long narrative epics such as Sakuntala, lyric poems, sonnets and plays, translated foreign classics, and composed in English and Hindi as well as Nepali. A philosopher of the human heart, he gave the language some of its most famous meditations on madness, beauty, loss and love. His essays and poems decisively modernised Nepali literature, spanning classical tradition and romantic sensibility. He died in 1959, leaving behind a body of work that every Nepali reader still grows up with.