Imtiaz Dharker

Imtiaz Dharker is a poet, artist and documentary filmmaker born in Lahore, Pakistan, who was raised in Glasgow, Scotland, after her family emigrated when she was an infant. She has lived for extended periods in Bombay (Mumbai) and London, and this experience of moving between cultures, languages and religious traditions runs through nearly all of her work. Themes of migration, exile, home, gender and religious conflict recur across her collections, often rendered with a spare, precise, image-driven style.

Her poetry collections include «Purdah», which explores the tension between concealment and visibility for women crossing cultural boundaries, and «Postcards from God», imagining a deity observing a world scarred by fundamentalism. Later books such as «I Speak for the Devil», «The Terrorist at My Table» and «Leaving Fingerprints» continued to interrogate borders, belonging and violence with unflinching clarity. Distinctively, Dharker is also a visual artist, and her books typically pair her poems with her own line drawings, creating a dialogue between image and text that is central to how her work is read.

Beyond poetry, she has worked for years as a documentary filmmaker in India, producing a substantial body of nonfiction film alongside her literary output. Her poems such as «Tissue», «Blessing» and «The Right Word» are widely studied for their compact, resonant treatment of everyday and political subjects.