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Moniza Alvi

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Moniza Alvi
FRSL
Born(1954-02-02)2 February 1954
Lahore, Pakistan
Alma materUniversity of York
OccupationPoet
Childrenone daughter
Websitemoniza.uk

Moniza Alvi FRSL (born 2 February 1954) is a British-Pakistani writer and poet. She has won several well-known prizes for her verse.[1] She was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.[2]

Life and education

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Moniza Alvi was born in Lahore, Pakistan, to a Pakistani father and a British mother.[3] Her father moved to Hatfield, Hertfordshire, in England when Alvi was few months old.[4] She did not revisit Pakistan until after the publication of one of her first books of poems – The Country at My Shoulder. She worked for several years as a high-school teacher but is currently a freelance writer and tutor, living in Norfolk.[5]

Poetry

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Peacock Luggage, a book of poems by Moniza Alvi and Peter Daniels, was published after the two poets jointly won the Poetry Business Prize in 1991, in Alvi's case for "Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan".[6] That poem and "An Unknown Girl" have featured on England's GCSE exam syllabus for young teenagers.[citation needed]

Since then, Moniza Alvi has written four poetry collections. The Country at My Shoulder (1993) led to her being selected for the Poetry Society's New Generation Poets promotion in 1994. She also published a series of short stories, How the Stone Found its Voice (2005), inspired by Kipling's Just So Stories.[citation needed]

In 2002, she received a Cholmondeley Award for her poetry. In 2003 a selection of her poetry was published in a bilingual Dutch and English edition.[7] A selection from her earlier books, Split World: Poems 1990–2005, was published in 2008.[8]

On 16 January 2014, Alvi participated in the BBC Radio 3 series The Essay – Letters to a Young Poet. Taking Rainer Maria Rilke's classic text, Letters to a Young Poet as their inspiration, leading poets wrote a letter to a protégé.[9]

Selected works

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Poetry

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  • Peacock Luggage (1991)
  • A Bowl Of Warm Air (1996)
  • Carrying my Wife (Bloodaxe Books, 2000) ISBN 978-1-85224-537-5
  • Souls (Bloodaxe, 2002) ISBN 978-1-85224-585-6
  • How the Stone Found Its Voice (Bloodaxe, 2005) ISBN 978-1-85224-694-5 – which was inspired by Kipling's Just So Stories
  • Split World: Poems 1990–2005 (Bloodaxe, 2008) ISBN 978-1-85224-802-4
  • Europa (2008)
  • Homesick For The Earth (2011)

Recordings

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Further reading

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  • Sonja Lehmann: Moniza Alvi's Europa. Rewriting Myth from a Feminist Postcolonial Perspective, in: Verorten - Verhandeln – Verkörpern. Interdisziplinäre Analysen zu Raum und Geschlecht, edited by Silke Förschler, Rebekka Habermas and Nikola Roßbach. Bielefeld, transcript Verlag 2014, pp. 41–60, ISBN 9783839423998

References

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  1. ^ Riggs, Thomas (1996). Contemporary Poets. St. James Press. p. 19. ISBN 978-1-55862-191-6.
  2. ^ Creamer, Ella (12 July 2023). "Royal Society of Literature aims to broaden representation as it announces 62 new fellows". The Guardian.
  3. ^ Mitali Pati Wong; Syed Khwaja Moinul Hassan (2013). The English Language Poetry of South Asians: A Critical Study. McFarland. pp. 92–4. ISBN 978-0-7864-3622-4.
  4. ^ Biography, Moniza Alvi website.
  5. ^ "Moniza Alvi - Literature". literature.britishcouncil.org. Retrieved 14 November 2024.
  6. ^ Sawnet Profile Archived 2 April 2012 at the Wayback Machine. Accessed March 2016.
  7. ^ Het land aan mijn schouder. Translations by Kees Klok. Sliedrecht: Wagner & Van Santen, 2003. ISBN 90-76569-36-3.
  8. ^ Bloodaxe, ISBN 978-1-85224-802-4.
  9. ^ "Moniza Alvi: The Essay, Letters to a Young Poet Episode 4 of 5", BBC Radio 3, 2014.
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