Moniza Alvi was born in Lahore, Pakistan, and came to England when she was a few months old. She grew up in Hertfordshire and has since become a prolific poet whose poetry is now taught on the UK’s GCSE syllabus. Her poetry is imbued with a spirit of fractured identity and transformation, and this experience is explored extensively in her first full length collection, The Country at My Shoulder (1993), which earned her a place on the New Generation Poets list in 1994. Since then, Alvi has written nine poetry collections: A Bowl of Warm Air (1996), Carrying My Wife (2000), Souls (2002), How the Stone Found its Voice (2005), Europa (2008), Homesick for the Earth (2011), At the Time of Partition (2013), Blackbird, Bye, Bye (2018), and Fairoz (2022). Where her early work was concerned with homelands – real and imagined – her later work explores the interplay between inner and outer worlds, imagination and reality, physical and spiritual experience. In 2002, Alvi received a Cholmondeley Award for her poetry, and after working for many years as a secondary school teacher in London, she is now a freelance writer and a tutor, particularly for the Poetry School.