Imtiaz Dharker

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Imtiaz Dharker
Imtiaz Dharker at the British Library 12 April 2011.jpg
Dharker at the British Library 12 April no
Chancellor of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne
In office
1 January 2020
Preceded byLiam Donaldson
Personal details
Born (1954-01-31) January 31, 1954 (age 67)
Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan
NationalityBritish
OccupationPoet, artist
Known forPoems such as 'the trick', 'speech balloon' as well as many other poems and books

Imtiaz Dharker is a British poet, artist and video film maker. She has won the Queen's Gold Medal for her English poetry[1][2] and was appointed Chancellor of Newcastle University from January 2020.[3] In 2019, she was considered for the position of Poet Laureate following the tenure of Carol Ann Duffy, but withdrew herself from contention in order, as she stated, to maintain focus on her writing."I had to weigh the privacy I need to write poems against the demands of a public role. The poems won," said Dharker.[4] For many Dharker is seen as one of Britain's most inspirational contemporary poets.[5] She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2011.[6] In the same year, she received the Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors.[7] In 2016 she received an Honorary Doctorate from SOAS University of London.

Dharker was born in Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan. She grew up in Glasgow where her family moved when she was less than one year old. She was married to Simon Powell, the founder of the organisation Poetry Live, who died in October 2009 after surviving for eleven years with cancer.[1][8] With Poetry Live, she reads to over 25,000students a year, travelling across the country with poets including Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage, John Agard, Gillian Clarke, Daljit Nagra, Grace Nichols, Owen Sheers, Jackie Kay and Maura Dooley.[9] Dharker divides her time between London, Wales, and Mumbai. She says she describes herself as a "Scottish Muslim Calvinist" adopted by India and married into Wales.[10] Her daughter Ayesha Dharker (whose father is Anil Dharker) is an actress in international films, television and stage.[11]

Literary career[]

Dharker has written seven books of poetry: Purdah (1989), Postcards from God (1997), I Speak for the Devil (2001), The Terrorist at my Table (2006), Leaving Fingerprints (2009), Over the Moon (2014) and Luck is the Hook (2018), all self-illustrated).[12]

Dharker is a prescribed poet on the British AQA GCSE English syllabus. Her poems Blessing, This Room and The right word were included in the AQA Anthology Different Cultures, Cluster 1 and 2 respectively. Her poem Tissue appears in the 2017 AQA poetry anthology for GCSE English Literature.[13] Her poems Living Space and In Wales, wanting to be Italian also appear in the poetry anthology for GCSE English Literature.

Dharker was a member of the judging panel for the 2008 Manchester Poetry Prize, with Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke.In 2011 she judged the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award with the poet Glyn Maxwell.[14] In 2012 she was nominated a Parnassus Poet at the Festival of the World, hosted by the Southbank Centre as part of the Cultural Olympiad 2012, the largest poetry festival ever staged in the UK, bringing together poets from all the competing Olympic nations. She was the poet in residence at the Cambridge University Library in January–March 2013. In July 2015 she appeared on the popular BBC Radio 4 programme Desert Island Discs[15] and spoke about growing up in Glasgow and her decision to leave her family and elope to India, as well as her second marriage to the late Simon Powell.

Themes[]

The main themes of Dharker's poetry include home, freedom, journeys, geographical and cultural displacement, communal conflict and gender politics.[12] All her books are published by the poetry publishing house Bloodaxe Books. Her poems, true to her experience, are moving testaments of global living, intercultural identities, itinerant existence, and human relationships. 'This mixed heritage and itinerant lifestyle is at the heart of her writing: questioning, imagistic and richly textured poems that span geographical and cultural displacement, conflict and gender politics, while also interrogating received ideas about home, freedom and faith. Yet for all the seriousness of her themes, Dharker is a truly global poet, whose work speaks plainly and with great emotional intelligence to anyone who has ever felt adrift in the increasingly complex, multicultural and shrinking world we inhabit. For a number of years now, her poems have been taught on the UK national curriculum. Right from 'Speech Balloon', charting the spread of a phrase from one culture to another, you experience Dharker's restless search for meaning and identity; what critic Arundhati Subramaniam describes as an "unabashed embrace of unsettlement as settlement" and "an exhilarating sense of life at the interstices". This is resonant in companion pieces 'Living Space' and 'One Breath', in which the fragility of homes in Mumbai, India becomes a wider metaphor for unstable personal and communal identities, as it is in the title poem from Leaving Fingerprints (2009), where the symbolism of those marks – immutable, personal and unique – merges with the stratigraphy of the living landscape...Those from her earliest books, Purdah (1988) and Postcards from god (1997), feature concise, atmospheric conjurings of place: one of Dharker's better-known poems, 'Blessing'...describes a slum neighbourhood in Mumbai where a mains water pipe bursts. But there are also poems with a philosophical edge, which ventriloquise the almighty so as to question the nature of belief and the tensions between the religious and secular. In 'Postcards from god I', for instance, the deity is a blank canvas, "nothing but a space / that someone has to fill", while in "Question 1" God becomes a TV channel-hopper, fast-forwarding, pausing and rewinding through our prayers, asking: "Am I there / when I can't hear your voice"? These poems harbour an obvious gravitas, but their accessibility, contemporaneity, and occasional levity lend them an inviting dynamism. Poems from a third collection, I speak for the devil (2001), explore the place of women in contemporary societies both East and West. 'Honour killing' is a defiant, subtly politicised piece, beginning with an identity strip-tease; "what happens when the self", as Dharker herself puts it, "squeezes past the easy cage of bone". The subjective nature of perspective and openness of interpretation are also at the crux of a fourth book, The terrorist at my table (2006), which revels in blurring the public and personal. 'The right word' is perhaps the most successful of these: describing the same scene in repeatedly differing terms, an anonymous figure is seen as a terrorist, freedom fighter, guerrilla warrior and martyr, before being cast as "a boy who looks like your son". [16] Of her book 'Over the Moon' the critic Muneeza Shamsie says,'Dharker's lyrical and poignant poems provide a nuanced quiet interplay with words but at the heart of the collection is a powerful and moving sequence which describes her husband's struggle against cancer and his last days. In 'Stab' her grief and anger emerges in the staccato words: "Stab the page. Stab it in the heart./Find the word that is not a word./Find the word that is a blade." 'You Said Something I did not Understand' tells of her husband in hospital, "the unfamiliar bed/a prison, your body behind bars/your bright spirit locked away". 'Vigil' describes him tied to a machine, as she watches over him until its signals stop: "I try to read its face./The machine is blinking back/its tears". She goes on to write of his funeral in 'After' and the sense of unreality. In 'The Other Side of Silence' images of grass, a broken eggshell and rain heighten the sadness and emptiness...In this spectacular collection — certainly Dharker's best — she encapsulates a myriad of intensely personal emotions with remarkable skill and control and gives her poems a further context by her black and white illustrations which accompany her words'.[17]

Film[]

Dharker is also a video film maker and has written and directed more than a hundred films and audio-visuals, centering on education, reproductive health and shelter for women and children. In 1980 she was awarded a Silver Lotus for a short film.[18]

Art[]

An accomplished artist, she has had 11 solo exhibitions of pen-and-ink drawings in India, Hong Kong, USA, UK, and France. All her poetry collections contain her drawings. She was one of the poet/artists featured in the Poet Slash Artist exhibition curated by poet Lemn Sissay and the art guru Hans Ulrich Obrist for Manchester International Festival 2021, along with Tracy Emin, Lubaina Himid, Precious Okoyomon, Julien Creuzet, Inua Ellams, Jay Bernard, Adonis, Etel Adnan, Anne Boyer, Jimmie Durham, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Renee Gladman, Vivienne Griffin, Sky Hopinka, Isaiah Hull, Tarek Lakhrissi, Lebogang Mashifane, Friederike Mayröcker, Jota Mombaça, Heather Phillipson, Tiffany Sia, Cecilia Vicuña, Xu Bing, Gozo Yoshimasu.

'In classical Chinese, Arabic and Persian poetry, calligraphy connects the verbal and visual in ways that make poetry and art practically the same thing. That way of seeing words is remade for today by Imtiaz Dharker in her captivating drawing My Breath. Stripes flow magically out of her body into space. The lines continue their journey through a second picture, then in the third become words, lines of poetry repeated, repeated, repeated through entire blocks of text. It is a perfect illustration of the subtle and mysterious relationship between writing and drawing, seeing and reading. Poet Slash Artist, curated by the poet Lemn Sissay and the art guru Hans Ulrich Obrist, probes the mystery of that borderland, and finds what can only be called spirituality. The soul, even... This exhibition is a manifesto for a new culture, where the hubbub and hype are silenced, and at last we can hear one another think.'[19]

Publications[]

  • Purdah (Oxford University Press, India, 1989)
  • Postcards from God (including Purdah) (Bloodaxe Books, 1997, ISBN 1-85224-407-0)
  • I Speak for the Devil (Bloodaxe Books, 2001, ISBN 978-1852245696; Penguin Books India, 2003)
  • The Terrorist at my Table (Bloodaxe Books, 2006, ISBN 1-85224-735-5; Penguin Books India 2007)
  • Leaving Fingerprints (Bloodaxe Books, 2009. ISBN 1-85224-849-1)
  • Over the Moon (Bloodaxe Books, 2014. ISBN 978-1780371207)
  • Luck is the Hook (Bloodaxe Books, 2018. ISBN 9781780372181)

References[]

  1. ^ Jump up to: a b "Imtiaz Dharker awarded Queen's gold medal for poetry". The Guardian.com. 17 December 2014. Retrieved 18 December 2014.
  2. ^ http://vision.ae/views/my_dubai_imtiaz_dharker
  3. ^ "Renowned poet Imtiaz Dharker named new Chancellor". Newcastle University. Retrieved 22 November 2019.
  4. ^ Flood, Alison (3 May 2019). "Hunt for next poet laureate still on as Imtiaz Dharker says no to job". The Guardian. Retrieved 10 January 2020.
  5. ^ AQA (2002). AQA Anthology 2005 onwards. Oxford University Press.
  6. ^ "Current RSL Fellows". The Royal Society of Literature. Archived from the original on 2 October 2012. Retrieved 5 January 2013.
  7. ^ "The Cholmondeley Awards for Poets". The Society of Authors. Retrieved 5 January 2013.
  8. ^ "Imtiaz Dharker". GCSE Poetry Live!.
  9. ^ https://poetrylive.net/. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  10. ^ Bose, Brinda (December 2007). "The (ubiquitous) f-word: musings on feminisms and censorships in South Asia". Contemporary Women's Writing. 1 (1–2): 14–23. doi:10.1093/cww/vpm012.
  11. ^ "The Conversation". BBC World Service. Retrieved 3 April 2016.
  12. ^ Jump up to: a b "Imtiaz Dharker". Poetry International Web. Retrieved 20 November 2006.
  13. ^ "Tissue by Imtiaz Dharker". BBC Bitesize. Retrieved 5 February 2017.
  14. ^ Helen Bowell. "Interview with Imtiaz Dharker, Poet and Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award Judge". The Poetry Society. Archived from the original on 14 July 2015. Retrieved 5 January 2013.
  15. ^ "Desert Island Discs, Imtiaz Dharker, Imtiaz Dharker: 'Poetry makes it possible to live'". BBC Radio 4. Retrieved 21 July 2015.
  16. ^ "Imtiaz Dharker". The Poetry Archive.
  17. ^ Muneeza Shamsie (23 August 2015). "REVIEW: Song of love and loss: Over the Moon by Imtiaz Dharker". Dawn.
  18. ^ "Imtiaz Dharker". imtiazdharker.com. Retrieved 21 July 2015.
  19. ^ Jonathan Jones (2 July 2021). "Poet Slash Artist review – if this show is art's future, it looks good to me". The Guardian.

External links[]

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