Ada Jafri

"The First Lady of Urdu Poetry" — the first prominent woman poet of the progressive era. Ada Jafri (1924–2015), born Aziz Jahan in Badayun, was the first prominent woman poet of the progressive era — honoured as "The First Lady of Urdu Poetry". Her father died when she was three; raised in a traditional household, she began composing verse at twelve under the name Ada Badayuni, and received guidance from poets including Akhtar Sheerani, who printed her first ghazal in his journal *Rooman*. She married the civil servant and littérateur Nurul Hasan Jafri in Lucknow in January 1947, taking the name Ada Jafarey, and moved with him to Karachi after Partition. Her first collection, *Main Saz Dhoondhti Rahi* (1950), announced a woman's voice writing the ghazal in the romanticist tradition with remarkable confidence; *Shahr-i Dard* (1967) won the Adamjee Literary Award. Later collections, an autobiography (*Jo Rahi So Bekhabari Rahi*), Urdu haiku, and her edited anthology *Ghazal Numa* followed. Pakistan honoured her with the Medal of Excellence (1981), the Pride of Performance (2003), and the Kamal-e-Fun lifetime award (2003) — the first woman to receive it. She died in Karachi on 12 March 2015.