Imtiaz Dharker recognised in the 2025 New Year Honours List
Renowned poet, artist and documentary film-maker Imtiaz Dharker has been recognised in the 2025 New Year's Honours List. She has been appointed OBE for services to the Arts.
Imtiaz Dharker responded to the news by saying:
“This came as a real surprise and I'm happy to accept it as an honour for poets and poetry in this country. In a time when discourse, especially political discourse, is devalued across the world, poetry has a powerful role to play. Poetry has always had a special place here. It's a kind of national language, the language of being human, whatever tongue it is in.”
Imtiaz Dharker has published seven poetry books with Bloodaxe, most recently Shadow Reader. She is an accomplished artist, and all her poetry collections are illustrated with her drawings, which form an integral part of her books. She was awarded The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry for 2014 for her fifth poetry book from Bloodaxe, Over the Moon, and for her services to poetry. She received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2020 she was appointed Chancellor of Newcastle University.
Imtiaz Dharker grew up a Muslim Calvinist in a Lahori household in Glasgow, was adopted by India and married into Wales. She now lives in London. Themes of social justice run throughout her work, which is often concerned with major issues facing the world today, including freedom, displacement, conflict and gender.
Her poems are on the British GCSE and A Level English syllabus, and she reads with other poets at GCSE Poetry Live! events all over the UK to more than 35,000 students a year, as well as headlining at literary festivals all over the world.
Dharker's internationally-regarded poetry is all published by Bloodaxe Books. An artist of note, Imtiaz has had a dozen solo exhibitions of drawings in India, London, Leeds, New York and Hong Kong. As a documentary film-maker she scripts and directs films, many of them for non-government organisations in India, working in the area of shelter, education and health for women and children.
Imtiaz has appeared many times on television and radio as both presenter and interviewee. Links to interviews, reviews and features for her latest collection Shadow Reader can be found here.
The full New Year's Honours List 2025 can be seen here.
Coverage in the Eastern Eye featuring Imtiaz Dharker can be seen here.
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Imtiaz Dharker: Shadow Reader
Imtiaz Dharker reads a selection of poems from Shadow Readerr. This video includes some of the drawings from Shadow Reader showing their visual connections with particular poems from the book. Neil Astley filmed her reading from her new collection at her home in London in January ahead of the book’s publication in May 2024.
[31 December 2024]
