Moniza Alvi

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Moniza Alvi FRSL (born 2 February 1954) is a British-Pakistani writer and poet. She has won several well-known prizes for her verse.<ref name="Riggs1996">Template:Cite book</ref> She was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Life and education

Moniza Alvi was born in Lahore, Pakistan, to a Pakistani father and a British mother.<ref name="WongHassan2013">Template:Cite book</ref> Her father moved to Hatfield, Hertfordshire, in England when Alvi was few months old.<ref>Biography, Moniza Alvi website.</ref> She did not revisit Pakistan until after the publication of one of her first books of poems – The Country at My Shoulder. She worked for several years as a high-school teacher but is currently a freelance writer and tutor, living in Norfolk.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Poetry

Peacock Luggage, a book of poems by Moniza Alvi and Peter Daniels, was published after the two poets jointly won the Poetry Business Prize in 1991, in Alvi's case for "Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan".<ref>Sawnet Profile Template:Webarchive. Accessed March 2016.</ref> That poem and "An Unknown Girl" have featured on England's GCSE exam syllabus for young teenagers.Template:Citation needed

Since then, Moniza Alvi has written over half a dozen poetry collections. He debut poetry collection, The Country at My Shoulder (1993), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 1993,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> led to her being selected for the Poetry Society's New Generation Poets promotion in 1994. She also published a series of short stories, How the Stone Found its Voice (2005), inspired by Kipling's Just So Stories.Template:Citation needed

In 2002, she received a Cholmondeley Award for her poetry. In 2003 a selection of her poetry was published in a bilingual Dutch and English edition.<ref>Het land aan mijn schouder. Translations by Kees Klok. Sliedrecht: Wagner & Van Santen, 2003. Template:ISBN.</ref> A selection from her earlier books, Split World: Poems 1990–2005,<ref>Bloodaxe, Template:ISBN.</ref> was published alongside Europa in 2008.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Both Europa and her new collection At the Time of Partition, published in 2013, were then shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in their respective years.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

On 16 January 2014, Alvi participated in the BBC Radio 3 series The Essay – Letters to a Young Poet. Taking Rainer Maria Rilke's classic text, Letters to a Young Poet as their inspiration, leading poets wrote a letter to a protégé.<ref>"Moniza Alvi: The Essay, Letters to a Young Poet Episode 4 of 5", BBC Radio 3, 2014.</ref>

Selected works

Poetry

Recordings

Further reading

  • Sonja Lehmann: Moniza Alvi's Europa. Rewriting Myth from a Feminist Postcolonial Perspective, in: Verorten - Verhandeln – Verkörpern. Interdisziplinäre Analysen zu Raum und Geschlecht, edited by Silke Förschler, Rebekka Habermas and Nikola Roßbach. Bielefeld, transcript Verlag 2014, pp. 41–60, Template:ISBN

References

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