by Sara Shagufta
Translated by Javeria Hasnain
Winner of the 2025 PEN-SALT award from English PEN.
ISBN: 9781069370464
October 2026 | OPENS FOR PRE-ORDERS in JULY
Poetry | Translation | Urdu
* draft cover (to be updated)
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Our eyes were carved from our tears.
We wrestled with our turbulences
& became our own laments.
Sara Shagufta's significance as one of Urdu's most remarkable modern poets is often eclipsed by controversies surrounding her life as a working-class woman searching for love and liberation within sexist poetic milieus in the shadow of repressive patriarchal laws in US-funded militarized Islamist rule in1980s Pakistan.
In this innovative translation of Shagufta's posthumous collection, Aankhein, Javeria Hasnain enters into contemporary dialogue with the poet's words, reminding us of how her uncanny metonyms and estranged metaphors unsettled conventions of respectable Urdu poetry. With startling leaps of association, and stark imagery, these moving poems delve into the sensual and erotic realm of the female body, invoking "eyes," "colours," and "dirt" to grieve the loss of a child, mourn a failed motherhood, and dismantle the patriarchal and societal forces that seek to eliminate womanhood.
The spare and courageous language of this collection asks readers the most vital and contemporary of questions: What does it mean to be a witness to one's own oppression?
BIOGRAPHIES
Sara Shagufta (1954-1984) was born in Gujranwal, Punjab in Pakistan to a working-class family displaced in 1947 from India by Partition and lived much of her life in the port-city of Karachi. She wrote experimental, confessional and political poetry and prose in both Urdu and Punjabi. Two volumes of her Urdu poetry, Aankhein and Neend ka Rang, were published posthumously after her tragic early death on June 4, 1984.
Javeria Hasnain is a poet, bilingual translator, and literary scholar. Her translation of Sara Shagufta's work for trace received the 2025 PEN Translates (English PEN-SALT) award. Her poems have been published widely and her debut chapbook, SIN was published in 2026. She was born in Karachi and currently resides in New York City.