Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Thrice the recipient of Pakistan’s highest award for Literature in English, M. Athar Tahir graduated from Government College Lahore, and was the 1974 Rhodes Scholar to Oriel College, Oxford University where he read English. He was a 1979 Rotary International Scholar to the University of Pennsylvania and a 1984 Hubert H. Humphrey Fellow to the University of Southern California where he won the William and Flora Hewlett Award. He joined the civil service of Pakistan, pursued a parallel career as a poet, literary and art critic, translator and Calligraph-artist and founded the International Centre for Pakistani Writing in English (ICPWE) at Kinnaird College, Lahore. He is the editor of the forthcoming Oxford Companion to Pakistani Art. An Elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain, he is also a Life Fellow of the Pakistan Academy of Letters, and has received Pakistan’s national honours: Tamgha-i Imtiaz (Medal of Distinction) and Sitara-i Imtiaz (Star of Distinction).
Tahir brings to his work trilingual literary traditions, of English, Urdu and Punjabi, and a glocal idiom. His critical and creative works have been published in Pakistan and aboard. His books on Literature, Art and Culture, have won a total of 11 (eleven) national and international awards. He has edited five occasional volumes of Pakistani English Poetry, published a collection, Other Seasons (1991), of short stories (some translated into Marathi and Arabic), and an essay collection Punjab Portraits (1992). He collaborated with Professor Christopher Shackle of SOAS London, on the translation of Hashmi Shah’s long poem Sassi (1986). His pioneering study of the nineteenth century Punjabi poet, Qadir Yar: A Critical Introduction, (1988) won the 1990 Shah Abdul Latif Award and the 1991 National Book Council Award and was used as text at Heidelburg University, Germany. His six volumes of poetry include Just Beyond The Physical (1991), A Certain Season (2000), Body Loom (2006) and he won the Patras Bokhari Award for three others: Yielding Years (2002), The Gift of Possession (2010) and The Last Tea (2015). His poems have been set as text for Secondary Schools and for the ‘O’ Levels, University of Cambridge and included in several Oxford University Press, and other anthologies. They have also been translated into Urdu, Chinese and Italian.
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