Yogesh Patel was born as a British Citizen on November 18, 1952, in Mombasa, Kenya, to Chandrakant and Madhuben Patel. Because of the Mau Mau movement and other insurgent dangers, he was separated from his parents and grew up, from 1959, in India with his strict Gandhian grandfather. He went on to study medicine and joined the State Medical Faculty’s Gandhi Eye Hospital in Aligarh but was turned out of the country in 1974 on grounds of being a foreigner. As a qualified optometrist and accountant, Patel returned to England to establish himself as a successful businessman and an acclaimed poet, writer, and curator of poetry. He currently edits Skylark and runs Skylark Publications UK and a non-profit Word Masala project he founded in 2010 to promote the literature of the South Asian Diaspora. He has also founded the Gujarati Literary Academy and has served as its president.