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 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 the Kinnaird College, Lahore. He has been awarded the Tamgha-i Imtiaz (1998) and the Sitara-i Imtiaz (2009) for his works.