Poets Directory (شعرائے کرام)

Ghulam Muhammad Qasir (d. 1999) was a Pakistani Urdu poet from Paharpur, Dera Ismail Khan, counted among the finest modern poets of the Urdu ghazal. A Pashtun who grew up speaking Pashto, he made Urdu his literary home. Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi introduced him in the journal Fanoon in 1977, the year his first collection Tasalsul appeared; Qasmi called him "the poet of continuity". Two further collections followed — Aathwaan Aasman Bhi Neela Hai (1988) and Darya-e-Gumaan (1997) — and his complete works were gathered as Ik Sher Abhi Tak Rehta Hai. By profession a lecturer in Urdu at government colleges across the North-West Frontier Province, he also wrote more than seventy dramas and programmes for PTV Peshawar and Radio Pakistan, including the popular serials Talash and Bhoot Bangla. His ghazal turns away from the beloved alone toward the deprivation and hope of ordinary people — a book instead of gunpowder, a dream instead of despair. He died in Peshawar on 20 February 1999 and is buried there; the Government of Pakistan awarded him the Pride of Performance posthumously in 2006–07.

Gulzar Dehlvi (1926–2020), born Anand Mohan Zutshi, was one of the last voices of Old Delhi's composite Ganga-Jamuni culture — a Kashmiri Pandit who carried the Gita and the Quran in one heart, and wrote Urdu ghazals in a white sherwani with a rose on his chest. Born on 7 July 1926 in Gali Kashmeerian, Old Delhi, to two poets — his father Tribhuvan Nath 'Zar' and his mother Brij Rani 'Be-Zaar' — he was given his pen name 'Gulzar', a bed of roses, by his ustad Bekhud Dehlvi. He took an M.A. from Hindu College, Delhi, and became editor-in-chief of Science Ki Duniya in 1975, Urdu's first science magazine. Jawaharlal Nehru recited his poem 'Zarurat Hai Un Naujawano Ki' from the Red Fort on 15 August 1947. Honoured by the Vice-President of India on his 91st birthday for his lifelong service to Urdu, he died at his Noida home on 12 June 2020, days after recovering from COVID-19, aged 93.