Imtiaz Dharker
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Born in Pakistan and brought up in Scotland, Imtiaz Dharker is a poet, artist and documentary film-maker who divides her time between London and India. Lahore born Imtiaz grew up in Glasgow as what she calls a “Muslim Calvinist” before eloping with an Indian Hindu to live in Bombay. She later moved to Britain when she married the late Simon Powell, the founder of Poetry Live! This mixed heritage and itinerant lifestyle is at the heart of her writing: questioning, imagistic and richly textured poems that span geographical and cultural displacement, conflict and gender politics, while also interrogating received ideas about home, freedom and faith. Yet for all the seriousness of her themes, Dharker is a truly global poet, whose work speaks plainly and with great emotional intelligence to anyone who has ever felt adrift in the increasingly complex, multicultural and shrinking world we inhabit. For a number of years now, her poems have been taught on the UK national curriculum. Home, freedom, travel, geographical and cultural offset, the conflict within the society and the gender policy are the main themes of the Imtiaz Dharker poetry. All books of the author were edited by the publishing office Bloodaxe Books. In her poems, the poetess touches on various aspects of life of the Muslim woman, who, in Dharker`s opinion, experiences injustice, oppression and violence being fed by the tradition of wearing of a purdah, a niqab, a paranja. Imtiaz Dharker is also a documentary filmmaker, a scriptwriter and a director of more than one hundred films and audiovisual projects devoted to education, protection of reproductive health and social aid to women and children. In the 1980, the poetess’s short film received the award “Silver Lotus”.
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Birth— 1954
Song of love and loss: Over the Moon