Sara Shagufta

Sara Shagufta (1954-84) is an important feminist Urdu poet. She wrote in Urdu and Punjabi and
spent most of her life in Karachi. Writer of adventurous free verse, she was a contested figure in
poetry circles in Pakistan and had a tumultuous personal life, details of which often unfairly
overshadow the critical appraisal of her groundbreaking work.

Afzal Ahmad Syed

Afzal Ahmad Syed is a polymath. A classical as well as a postmodernist Urdu poet, he is a translator
of World Literature with works ranging from Mir Taqi Mir's Persian Divan to the poetry of Gabriel
García Márquez. He was born in Ghazipur in pre-Partition India in 1946 and worked as an
Entomologist in Karachi. He is recognized as one of the leading poets from Pakistan.
Deepak Sharma Deep

Deepak Sharma Deep is a contemporary poet of Hindi, Urdu and Hindustani. He hails from Satna,
Maharashtra. It will not be too contrived to say that he is one of the pioneering Hindi poets on
social media, writing from the early days of Facebook. Deep often incorporates elements of Deshaj
words as well various dialects of Hindi which provide a raw originality to his oeuvre.

Gorakh Pandey

Born in 1945, Gorakh Pandey was a Bhojpuri and Hindi poet from Deoria and later a researcher at
JNU. Some of his songs and poems have become anthems of dissent due to their inherent
fearlessness and their support for the systematically disenfranchised. He was a poet of the people
and his poetry was all the more powerful owing to the use of simple words and expressions.