Aziz Hamid Madni

Aziz Hamid Madni (1922–1991) was a Pakistani poet, critic and translator, and one of the stalwarts of the new Urdu ghazal in Pakistan. He was born on 15 June 1922 in Raipur, in British India, the son of Mohammad Hamid Saqi — a student of Shibli Nomani and a classmate of Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar. In 1948 he moved to Pakistan and settled in Karachi. After a master's degree in English, he taught and worked in journalism for a short while, then joined Radio Pakistan as a programme executive. Three collections of his poetry appeared in his lifetime — Chashm-e-Nigaraan (1962), Dasht-e-Imkaan (1964) and Nakhl-e-Gumaan (1983) — and his two-volume critical survey of modern Urdu poetry, Jadeed Urdu Shaeri, remains a landmark study. His translations of Shakespeare's Othello and Antony and Cleopatra, and most of his translations of French poetry into Urdu, were never published. Forty-three of his ghazals and thirty-seven of his sher survive, and some of his ghazals have been set to music. He died in Karachi on 23 April 1991.