Ali Anwar Ahmad

Hailing from Kasur (Pakistan), the burial place of the legendary Punjabi Sufi poet Bhulleh Shah, Ali Anwar Ahmad has had an impressive twenty-seven-year long career as a school teacher. With a Bachelor in Education and a Master`s Degree in Urdu, it is no wonder that Ahmad has become a prolific writer. Drawing inspiration from the great historic Punjabi poets of the region, he published his first collection of poems Akh Samundar Hoee (Eye Becomes Ocean) in the first year of the twenty first century.

Encouraged by Lahore based literary friends Jamil Ahmad Pal (Svare International Magazine) and Karahmat Mughal (Revel Magazine), Ahmad to start writing short stories. Very quickly he distinguished himself as a crafter of award winning short stories. He received the prestigious Masood Khadar Posh Trust Award in 2002 for the short story collection, Insan and Sup (Man and Viper). Since then nine collections of his short stories have been published totaling nearly two hundred stories. In his 2016 Tand Tand Maili Chaadar Anwar has shown the richness of his craft with twenty three stories exposing the hypocrisies of his characters in their day to day lives. As a finalist of the 2017 Dhahan Prize in the Shahmukhi script, Anwar continues to add a growing number of literary awards for his excellent fiction including the Safkat Tanveer Mirza Award from the Punjabi Institute of Language, Art and Culture, Lahore.