Vyasa

The author of the Mahabharata is disputed, with many scholars believing it began as an oral tradition and so has multiple authors. Another tradition names the author as Vyasa, who appears in the poem as a character himself. One of the most widely read English-language editions of the poem is the abridged Penguin Classics version by John D. Smith, which condenses the sprawling poem into one large volume. Smith was a scholar of Sanskrit and Hindi who lectured at the University of London in the 1970s before becoming a professor at the University of Cambridge in 1984. His early work focused on the writing and traditions of Rajasthan, a northern state of India. In 1997, he began working on the Mahabharata, a task that took him until 2008—a full fifth of his life, as he once noted. Smith retired from Cambridge in 2007.