Noshi Gillani was born in Pakistan in 1964. Her fifth collection of poems: Ay Meeray Shureek-E-Risal-E-Jaan, Hum Tera Intezaar Kurtay Rahey (O My Beloved, I Kept Waiting for You) was published in Pakistan in 2008. The candour and frankness of her highly-charged poems is unusual for a woman writing in Urdu and she has gained […]
Marion Molteno is a prize-winning novelist whose writing draws on the unusual cultural range of her life experience. If you can walk, you can dance won a Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for the best book from Africa, and two of her novels feature oral poetry – Urdu and Persian poetry in her latest novel, Uncertain Light, […]
Javed Akhtar is a highly respected Urdu poet who grew up in a family steeped in the traditions of classical poetry. In addition to writing poetry he is an award winning screen-play writer for Bollywood. Like Zehra Nigah, his poems use both classical and new forms.
Zehra Nigah from Pakistan is a highly regarded poet in a culture in which poetry is almost universally popular. In the Urdu tradition she was one of the first women poets to challenge the traditional roles of women. As a child her life was filled with poetry and like Javed Akhtar she uses both traditional […]
Sascha Aurora Akhtar originates from Pakistan, and was educated there and in the USA. Her debut poetry collection, The Grimoire of Grimalkin, was published in 2007 and greeted as “a contemporary masterpiece”, with the British newspaper The Guardian naming Akhtar one of the top twelve poets to watch. About her own work, she says: “As […]
Nukhbah Langah reveals the challenges she experienced in translating Noshi Gillani’s intense, ambiguous and exceptionally complex poetry from Urdu into English.
Lavinia Greenlaw writes about the impact that listening to Noshi Gillani read her poems had on her translations: ‘I had in my head Emily Dickinson’s dashes – how they hold the parts of her poems in mid-air, or the artist Cornelia Parker’s suspended cutlery and blown-up shed.’