Imtiaz Dharker awarded Queen’s gold medal for poetry
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http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/17/imtiaz-dharker-queens-gold-medal-poetry Version 0 of 1. The Pakistan-born British poet Imtiaz Dharker has been awarded the Queen’s gold medal for poetry, joining an illustrious roll call that includes WH Auden, Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes. Buckingham Palace announced on Wednesday that Dharker would be the 2014 recipient of a prestigious prize created in 1933 by George V at the suggestion of the then poet laureate John Masefield. The current poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, selected this year’s committee “of eminent men and women of letters” who selected Dharker; chosen on the basis of her new collection, Over the Moon, and a lifetime’s contribution to poetry. Duffy paid tribute. “Whether Imtiaz Dharker writes of exile, childhood, politics or grief, her clear-eyed attention brings each subject dazzlingly into focus,” she said. “She makes it look easy, this clarity and economy, but it is her deft phrasing, wit and grace that create this immediacy.” Dharker was born in Lahore in 1954 and grew up in Glasgow as what she calls a “Muslim Calvinist” before eloping with an Indian Hindu to live in Bombay. She later moved to Britain when she married the late Simon Powell, the founder of Poetry Live! Duffy said Dharker drew together her three countries, Pakistan, Britain and India, to create “writing of the personal and the public with equal skill”. She added: “Hers is a unique perspective and an essential voice in the diversity of English-language poetry. It is a moral force – a force for good and a force for change – that refuses to see the world as anything less personal than an extended village of near neighbours sharing in common struggles for how best to live.” Dharker said she still could not believe she had won, saying: “My first thought was that I wish my father were alive to hear this. In the last few weeks before he died, at almost 100 years old, he didn’t always remember his children, but did speak of the Queen with great admiration. The fact that this is her medal for poets, an award from her, feels very personal to me. “It also feels like a connection to a whole line of poets who have been my heroes, all the way from Auden to UA Fanthorpe to John Agard. It reminds me how Britain has opened its heart to many kinds of poetry and somehow recognised and made space for the unexpected voice.” Dharker’s poems are studied by GCSE and A-level students throughout Britain and, with Poetry Live!, she reads to more than 25,000 students a year. The medal, last year won by Douglas Dunn, is approved by the Queen and will be presented by her in 2015. Mumbai? Kissmiss? Of course! Who is not knowing this, that after Happy Diwali comes Merry Kissmiss! Impossible to miss, when allovermumbai, Matharpacady to A to Z Market, rooftops are dancing in chorus and alloversky is fully full with paper stars. Hear! Horns are telling at midnight on every street, Happy Happy Happy! We know very well to make good festival, and Saint Santa is our honoured guest in Taj Hotel. We are not forgetting. And allovermumbai alloversky is fully full with paper stars. See! Tree is shining and snow (cotton- wool but looks good, no?). Small child also face is shining, licking icing, this must be what snow tastes like under the paper stars. And allovermumbai alloversky is fully full with paper stars. Imtiaz Dharker, Over the Moon (Bloodaxe Books, 2014) |