Melanie Silgardo is a Goan Christian from the post-1970s era of Indian poetry in English. She was born in 1956 in Bombay (Mumbai) to Roman Catholic parents. She studied English at St. Xavier’s College in Bombay. Like her teacher and mentor, Eunice de Souza, she became one of India’s major English-language poets in the 1970s. From de Souza, she learned to write about herself and her past in a direct conversational style and to use her Goan childhood and relationship with her parents as a basis for self-exploration. She worked at the feminist Virago Press until the mid-1990s before turning to creative writing and teaching. She is based in London presently. A selection of her poems first appeared in the 1978 volume Three Poets—the first of four collections of poetry launched by Newground, a short-lived collective she founded along with contemporary Bombay poets Santan Rodrigues and Raul D’Gama Rose in the same year. Silgardo produced her second volume of poems Skies of Design in 1985 as part of her course at the London College of Printing. It won the Best First Book Commonwealth Poetry Prize, Asian Section.