Background
Moniza Alvi was born in Lahore, Pakistan, and came to England when she was a few months old. She grew up in Hertfordshire and studied at the universities of York and London.
Moniza Alvi was born in Lahore, Pakistan, and came to England when she was a few months old. She grew up in Hertfordshire and studied at the universities of York and London.
University: University of York
University: University of London
Peacock Luggage, a book of poems by Moniza Alvi and Peter Daniels, was published as a result of the two poets jointly winning the Poetry Business Prize in 1991. Since then, Moniza Alvi has written six poetry collections: The Country at My Shoulder (1993), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award, and which led to her being selected for the Poetry Society's New Generation Poets promotion; A Bowl of Warm Air (1996), one of the Independent on Sunday's Books of the Year; Carrying My Wife (2000), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Souls (2002); How the Stone Found its Voice (2005), inspired by Kipling's Just So Stories and Europa(2008), a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize. Also published in 2008 Split World includes poems from her first five collections.
Moniza's latest publication is Homesick for the Earth (2011) selected poems by the French poet Jules Supervielle with versions by Moniza Alvi.
Moniza Alvi now tutors for the Poetry School and lives in Norfolk. In 2002 she received a Cholmondeley Award for her poetry.
Alvi’s poetry is imbued with a spirit of duality, partition, fractured identity and transformation: her early work was concerned with homelands – real and imagined – in poems which are “vivid, witty and imbued with unexpected and delicious glimpses of the surreal – this poet's third country” (Maura Dooley). In these poems she imagines what it would have been like never to have left, to have grown up in Pakistan rather than having left and become a different person.
