Athar Tahir

M. Athar Tahir is a Lahore-based English language poet and a retired civil servant. Thrice the recipient of the Patras Bokhari Award, the highest National Prize for Literature in English, he is a poet, essayist, short story writer, translator and scholar of Punjabi texts, as well as a calligrapher-artist, and art critic and art historian. Tahir has published over twenty books, including several volumes of poetry and essays, such as ‘A Certain Season’ and ‘Body Loom’. His latest book, ‘Telling Twilight’, adds to his impressive body of work. His poems, also translated into Italian, Urdu, and Chinese, have been set as text for Secondary Schools and for the Cambridge O Level Syllabus, and have also been included in several OUP anthologies and in ‘Language for a New Century’ (W.W. Norton & Co., USA). He is the Founder-Director of the International Centre for Pakistani Writing in English (ICPWE) at Kinnaird College, Lahore. He has been awarded the Tamgha-i Imtiaz (1998) and the Sitara-i Imtiaz (2009) for his works.