M. Athar Tahir

Thrice the recipient of the Patras Bokhari Award (Yielding Years [2002]); The Gift of Possession [2010]; and The Last Tea [2015]), the highest National Prize for Literature in English, Athar Tahir is the founder of the International Centre for Pakistani Writing in English, Lahore. He was the 1974 Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University; a 1979 Rotary International Scholar; and a 1984 Hubert H. Humphrey Fellow. 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. His books on literature, art, and culture, have won eleven national and international awards. Tahir is an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Life Fellow of the Pakistan Academy of Letters. He has been awarded the Tamgha-i Imtiaz (1998) and the Sitara-i Imtiaz (2009) for his works.