Daybreak

Yasmeen Hameed has over twenty-five years of experience in the fields of education, literature, and the arts. Writer in Residence at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), she is responsible for designing and teaching courses in Urdu Literature, and also manages the Gurmani Centre for Languages and Literature there.

She has authored four books of poetry in Urdu. These are, Pas-i-aaina, Hisaar-i-bay-dar-o-deewar, Aadha din aur aadhi raat and Fana bhi eik saraab. The books were collectively published under the title Doosri Zindagi (700 pages) in 2007. Her most recent publication is Pakistani Urdu Verse (English…513 pages…Oxford University

Press, October 2010). She has edited and translated this anthology of the Urdu nazm, introducing sixty-three poets of the post-Iqbal period. She is Guest Editor of Pakistani Literature (English), published by the Pakistan Academy of Letters, Islamabad and has edited eight volumes of the journal, including two volumes (590 pages) of a special issue on women writers from Pakistan. She has extensively translated Urdu poetry into English. She has contributed to the column called Poetic Justice of the Books & Authors section of The Daily Dawn, through which she introduced and translated forty two contemporary Urdu poets. She has also hosted music and literary programmes for Pakistan Television. Her third collection of poetry was awarded the National Allama Mohammed Iqbal Award for the best book of poetry for the year 1996. Her fourth collection was awarded the Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi Award for the best book of poetry for the year 2001. In 2006, she received the Fatima Jinnah

Medal for Literature by the Government of Punjab. In 2008, she was awarded the Tamgha-i-Imtiaz for Literature by the Government of Pakistan.

Presently she is working on her fifth collection of verse in Urdu, Be samar pairon ki kwaahish and translation of Poetry from the SAARC nations into Urdu (140 poems from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Maldives) translated into Bahasa Indonesian.