Raja Changez Sultan

A poet and a painter of international repute, Raja Changez Sultan is a native of Shakarparian, Islamabad. He received his early education from Lawrence College, Ghora Gali, Pakistan. Thereafter he studied at the Royal Shrewsbury School in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England and proceeded on to the United States. He holds an honorary Doctorate in the Arts from Trinity College, Hartford, Conn. USA. for his lifelong contribution to the arts (poetry and painting). Besides, he also holds an MFA in Creative Writing and an MSc in Journalism, both from Columbia University, NY, NY, USA. He won the Henry Taylor Gold Medal while at the Journalism School there and was one of 4 student poets selected from the State of Connecticut in 1971 to give a series of poetry reading at various colleges and universities across the State. After a brief stint with the United Nations in Switzerland, he joined the Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation before ending up as the Director General of The Pakistan National Council of the Arts. He has travelled extensively in the United States, Europe, China, and the Far East, as well as Pakistan. As a painter he has held over 60 solo and group exhibitions of his work in Pakistan, England, Switzerland, Austria, India and in the Middle East. The following are his published books of poetry thus far: ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Nomad’, ‘The Death Of Indifference And Other Poems,’ ‘Shakarparian’, and The Himalayan Odyssey. Besides 5 other books that are under publication, over the past 15 years, he has also combined efforts with Raja Reza Sultan to write 5 volumes of poetry comprising 1200 pages on almost every endangered or threatened animal in the world. This body of work is unique in that no one in the history of English Literature has written so much poetry dedicated to the cause of promoting awareness and knowledge of animals in distress in a cruel and uncaring world. Through other means of communications, a lot of people have done wonders in this field, but not in literature specifically, and certainly not in English Poetry on this large a magnitude.