Born in 1947 to a Zoroastrian business family in Bombay, India, Hoshang Merchant graduated second in his B.A. class (1968) with a major in English and a minor in the Culture of India. He holds a Master’s from Occidental College, Los Angeles. At Purdue University he specialised in the Renaissance and Modernism, where he obtained his Ph.D. He has published thirteen books of poetry since 1989. He helped establish the Gay Liberation at Purdue. Since leaving Purdue in 1975, Merchant lived and taught in Heidelberg, Iran and Jerusalem. He has studied Buddhism at the Tibetan Library at Dharamsala, North India, as well as Islam in Iran and Palestine. Currently he teaches Poetry and Surrealism at Hyderabad University and is unmarried by choice.