Moniza Alvi

Moniza Alvi was born in Lahore, Pakistan to a Pakistani father and a British mother. Just a few months after her birth, the family relocated to Hatfield, Hertfordshire. Alvi pursued higher education at the Universities of York and London before working for several years as a secondary school teacher. She later transitioned into a freelance career as a poet and tutor, regularly collaborating with the Poetry School. She currently lives in Wymondham, Norfolk.

Her passion for poetry began at age 16 when she joined a local poetry group. Although she paused writing during her twenties, she later returned to poetry through an exploration of her dreams and imagination, becoming interested in the unconscious and the origins of creativity. Alvi’s poetry is defined by a strong sense of duality, namely between 'East' and 'West', childhood memories and adult perspectives, imagination and reality. Her work often reflects on the feeling of belonging and the concept of home, both real and imagined, by blending the surreal with the everyday.

Growing up in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, Pakistan often felt like a distant, almost mythical place to her. Much of Alvi's writing, particularly regarding Pakistan and India, comes from her imagination, family stories and what she has learned over the years. She did not return to the country of her birth until after the publication of her debut poetry collection, The Country at My Shoulder (1993), which was shortlisted for both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award and led to her selection for the Poetry Society’s New Generation Poets. It was only later that she began exploring her family's history and the impact of the partition of India, especially after discovering the story of a lost relative who would eventually inform her poetry collection At the Time of Partition (2013), which was a Poetry Book Society Choice, shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and won the East Anglian Book Award for Poetry.

Alvi’s poems 'Present from My Aunts' and 'An Unknown Girl' have been featured on England's GCSE exam syllabus for young teenagers, bringing her work into classrooms and introducing a new generation to her work. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 2002.