Moniza Alvi

Moniza Alvi (born 1954) is a Pakistani-British poet, born in Lahore to a Pakistani father and a British mother and brought to Hatfield, England, as an infant. She worked for years as a high-school teacher, won the Poetry Business Prize in 1991 for 'Presents from My Aunts in Pakistan', and saw The Country at My Shoulder (1993), Europa (2008) and At the Time of Partition (2013) all shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize; she received a Cholmondeley Award in 2002 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023. ¹

Alvi was born in Lahore on 2 February 1954. ^{1 2 3} Her father moved to Hatfield in Hertfordshire when she was a few months old, and she did not revisit Pakistan until after the publication of one of her first books of poems, The Country at My Shoulder. ¹ She worked for several years as a high-school teacher and now works as a freelance writer and tutor, living in Norfolk. ¹

Peacock Luggage (1991), a joint book with Peter Daniels, followed the Poetry Business Prize, which Alvi won for 'Presents from My Aunts in Pakistan'; that poem and 'An Unknown Girl' have featured on England's GCSE syllabus. ¹ Her debut collection The Country at My Shoulder (1993) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and led to her selection for the Poetry Society's New Generation Poets promotion in 1994. ¹ She received a Cholmondeley Award in 2002, published the Kipling-inspired stories How the Stone Found its Voice in 2005, and saw both Europa (2008) and At the Time of Partition (2013) shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in their years. ¹ Her later collections include Blackbird, Bye Bye (2018), and she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023. ¹

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