Agha Shahid Ali

Agha Shahid Ali
Born	Agha Shahid Ali (1949-02-04)4 February 1949 Delhi, Punjab, India
Died	8 December 2001(2001-12-08) (aged 52)
Resting place	Amherst, Massachusetts
Alma mater	University of Kashmir University of Delhi University of Arizona (MFA) Pennsylvania State University (PhD)
Occupation	Poet, Professor
Known for	National Book Award 2001, Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada
Notable credit(s)	The Country Without a Post Office, Rooms Are Never Finished and The Rebel's Silhouette
Relatives	Agha Ashraf Ali (Father) Prof. Agha Iqbal Ali (brother) Prof. Hena Ahmad , Prof. Sameetah Agha (Sisters) Agha Shaukat Ali (Uncle) Begum Zaffar Ali (Grandmother)
Awards	Pushcart Prize

Agha Shahid Ali (4 February 1949 – 8 December 2001) was an Kashmir-born poet who immigrated to the United States who became affiliated with the literary movement known as New Formalism in American poetry. His collections include A Walk Through the Yellow Pages, The Half-Inch Himalayas, A Nostalgist's Map of America, The Country Without a Post Office, and Rooms Are Never Finished, the latter a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001.

The University of Utah Press awards the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize annually in memory of this "celebrated poet and beloved teacher."

Early life and education

Agha Shahid Ali was born in Delhi, East Punjab, Dominion of India, into the illustrious Qizilbashi Agha family of Srinagar, Kashmir. He grew up in India's Kashmir Valley, and left for the United States in 1976. Shahid's father Agha Ashraf Ali was a renowned educationist. His grandmother Begum Zaffar Ali was the first woman matriculate of Kashmir. Shahid was educated at the Burn Hall School, later University of Kashmir and Hindu College, University of Delhi. He earned a PhD in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1984, and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona in 1985. He held teaching positions at nine universities and colleges in India and the United States.

Shahid was born a Shia Muslim, but his upbringing was secular. Shahid and his brother Iqbal both studied at an Irish Catholic parochial school and, in an interview, he recalled that: "There was never a hint of any kind of parochialism in the home." He was gay.

He died of brain cancer in December 2001 and was buried in Northampton, Massachusetts, in the vicinity of Amherst, a town sacred to his beloved poet Emily Dickinson.

Literary work

Ali expressed his love and concern for his people in In Memory of Begum Akhtar and The Country Without a Post Office, which was written with the Kashmir conflict as a backdrop. He was a translator of Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz (The Rebel's Silhouette; Selected Poems), and editor for the Middle East and Central Asia segment of Jeffery Paine's Poetry of Our World. He also compiled the volume Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English. His last book was Call Me Ishmael Tonight, a collection of English ghazals, and his poems are featured in American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006) and other anthologies.

Ali taught at the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at University of Massachusetts Amherst, at the MFA Writing Seminars at Bennington College as well as at creative writing programs at University of Utah, Baruch College, Warren Wilson College, Hamilton College and New York University.

Personal life

Shahid Ali never married. He was rumoured to be gay.

Bibliography

This list represents the published output of Ali, arranged in chronological order and sorted by the manner in which he contributed to the work in question.

Poetry

• Bone Sculpture (1972),
• In Memory of Begum Akhtar and Other Poems (1979),
• The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987),
• A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987),
• A Nostalgist's Map of America (1991),
• The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992),
• The Country Without a Post Office (1997),
• Rooms Are Never Finished (2001),
• Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals (2003).

Translations and edited volumes

• Translator, The Rebel's Silhouette: Selected Poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1992),
• Editor, Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English (2000).

Influences

Ali was deeply moved by the music of Begum Akhtar. The two had met through a friend of Akhtar's when Ali was a teenager and her music became a lasting presence in his life. Features of her ghazal rendition—such as wit, wordplay and nakhra (affectation)—were present in Ali's poetry as well. However, Amitav Ghosh suspects that the strongest connection between the two rose from the idea that "sorrow has no finer mask than a studied lightness of manner"—traces of which were seen in Ali's and Akhtar's demeanor in their respective lives.

Awards

• Pushcart Prize
• Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996
• Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Fellowship
• Ingram-Merrill Foundation Fellowship
• New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship

Further reading

• 'I Write on that Void: Kashmir, Kaschmir, Cashmere, Qashmir' – Remembering Agha Shahid Ali The Wire
• Looking for Shahid The Hindu
• Eric Pace (26 December 2001) Agha Shahid Ali, 52, a Poet Who Had Roots in Kashmir The New York Times
• Brief biography at the University of Massachusetts
• How the legendary Begum Akhtar influenced the life and poetry of Agha Shahid Ali
• Parveen, Rasheda (2014). "AGHA SHAHID ALI'S ENGLISH GHAZALS AND THE TRANSNATIONAL POLITICS OF LITERARY SUBVERSION" (PDF). The Challenge. 23 (1). Archived from the original (PDF) on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 26 April 2015.
• Rath, Akshaya K. (2010). "Ethno-Sexual Violence: A Study of Agha Shahid Ali's Kashmiri Poetry" (PDF). Kavya Bharati. 22. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 September 2015. Retrieved 26 April 2015.
• Ali, Kazim, ed. (2017). Mad Heart Be Brave: Essays on the Poetry of Agha Shahid Ali. University of Michigan Press. ISBN 9780472053506.

External links

• Agha Shahid Ali at Poets.org
• Agha Shahid Ali at the Poetry Foundation
• Agha Shahid Ali prize, University of Utah Press
• 'I swear...I have my hopes: Agha Shahid Ali's Delhi Years', Kafila.org
• 'The Veilied Suite: The Collected Poems by Agha Shahid Ali' biblio-india.org, March–April 2010.