Books
FAHMIDA RIAZ (1946– ) was born in Meerut into a literary family that migrated to Hyderabad, Pakistan, at Partition where she learned Sindhi, Persian, Urdu, and English. She earned her masters degree from Sindh University. Riaz is a distinguished Urdu poet, feminist, and human rights activist. To date, no woman writer in Pakistani English literature has written either poetry or fiction with a voice as powerful, fierce, and outspoken as Riaz.
The recipient of the 1997 Hammett-Hellman Award from Human Rights Watch, she has published many collections of poetry and prose; including Badan Dareedah (Maktaba-e-Danyal, 1973), which was Pakistan's first book of feminist poetry and forged new directions in women's writing in Pakistan. Her use of the feminine gender for a poetry form that was usually written in the male gender caused a furor, and Riaz was accused of publishing eroticism. In the 1980s Riaz was persecuted by the military regime of General Zia-ul-Haq, which led to many years of political exile in New Delhi. Here she began writing an English novel because she felt cut off from Pakistan's familiar Urdu milieu. Later she developed and published extracts of the novel as English short stories.
