Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Faiz Ahmed Faiz was born on 13 February 1911 at Kala Qader, near Sialkot, in what is now Narowal district, Pakistan (Wikipedia says Narowal district, Poets.org says Sialkot). He studied at Government College, Lahore, and took his MA in English in 1932. After graduating in 1935 he taught at the M.A.O. College in Amritsar and then at the Hailey College of Commerce in Lahore. He joined the Progressive Writers' Movement in 1936 and was named its first secretary. In 1942 he joined the British Indian Army, and he resigned in 1947.

Key moments

• August 1947: he wrote "Subh-e-Azadi" (Freedom's Dawn). Scroll calls it possibly the most popular poem associated with the dismay of Partition. Outlook India says it presents the dawn of independence as falling short of what the travellers had hoped for, and urges them to keep going.
• 1947: he became editor of the English-language Pakistan Times.
• 9 March 1951: he was arrested under the Safety Act, with army officers, in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case, over an alleged plot to overthrow Liaquat Ali Khan's government. Dawn says he was held in solitary confinement for three months and then in Hyderabad jail, for nearly four years in all, and that the detainees were freed under an amnesty by mid-1955. Wikipedia gives his release as 2 April 1955. His prison poems are collected in Dast-e-Saba and Zindan Nama.
• 1962: the Lenin Peace Prize (Poets.org dates it 1963).
• 1979: after the military takeover under Zia ul-Haq and Bhutto's execution, he went into exile in Beirut, where he edited the magazine Lotus. He returned in 1982 in poor health.
• 20 November 1984: he died in Lahore. Pakistan's Nishan-e-Imtiaz was conferred on him in 1990, after his death.

Sources differ on his sentence in 1951: Poets.org says he was sentenced to death, while Wikipedia says four years' imprisonment. All agree that he spent about four years in jail.

He is remembered as one of the great Urdu poets of the subcontinent, a Punjabi from the Sialkot area who taught in Amritsar and Lahore, two cities that Partition placed in different countries.