More than any other Kashmiri, Agha Shahid Ali captured the spirit of his land and his people with the power of his writing. Across a life that spanned five decades and ended too soon on 8 December, Agha Shahid transcended imposed identities and wrote with a simple morality about life and love and their various intersections in Kashmir. He died away from his home in an American hospital, but with the comfort of his immediate family.
Born in New Delhi on 4 February 1949, Agha Shahid grew up as a Muslim in Kashmir, and served as a poet-witness to the travails of the troubled land. He was educated at the University of Kashmir, Srinagar, and the University of Delhi, before earning a Ph.D. in English from Pennsylvania State University (1984) and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona (1985). A prolific writer, Agha Shahid published hundreds of poems in his lifetime, including such wellregarded collections as Rooms Are Never Finished (2001), The Country Without a Post Office (1997), The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992), A Nostalgist's Map of America (1991), A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987), The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987), In Memory of Begum Akhtar and Other Poems (1979), and Bone Sculpture (1972). In addition to his creative work, Agha Shahid was also a celebrated scholar who specialised in the works of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. In 1986, he published T. S. Eliot as Editor, and later translated Faiz Ahmed Faiz's The Rebel's Silhouette: Selected Poems (1992), and edited Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English (2000).