Faiz Ahmad Faiz was Pakistani intellectual and poet. He was born in a literary family in Sialkot, Punjab. After undergoing rigourous education that included masters in Arabic and English, he joined the academia in 1935 and eventually joined the army in 1942. After spending a few years in the army stationed at Delhi, he returned to Lahore, in 1947.
Following his return, he served as editor of the Pakistan Times, the Urdu newspaper Imroze, Lail-o-Nihar and Adab-e-Latif. In 1959, he was appointed as the Secretary of the Pakistan chapter of UK’s Arts Council and moved to London. He returned to Karachi, Pakistan in 1964 and joined as the Principal of the Abdullah Haroon College.
His major works include Naqsh-e-Faryadi (1943), Dast-e-Saba (1952), Zindan-Nama (1956), Dast-e-Tah-e-Sung (1965), Mere Dil Mere Musafir (1981) and Sar-e-Wadi-e-Sina (1971) which have been compiled in “Nuskha Haa-e-Wafa”.
In popular culture, his work has been used in several plays and films.
He was the first Asian poet to be awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the Soviet Union (1963) and was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1984. In 1976, he won the Lotus Prize for Literature.
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