Sara Shagufta is one of the most talented and the least recognized poets in the history of Urdu literature. Born on 31st October, 1954 in Pakistan, she was taken out of school and married off at an early age, as was the custom within conservative families in those days. Despite not having formal education, she had a mastery over language and her verse showed exquisite craftsmanship. But like other female confessional poets of her generation, such as Plath and Sexton, her struggles with mental illness and her suicide, often overshadow her powerful poetry. Anger and angst is a recurring trope of Sara’s poetry as she writes about gender, sexuality and identity. Sara owns her anger, and that is what makes her verse daunting because she is not afraid to express her vulnerability. As Katherine Peters notes in her unpublished thesis ‘She wrote boldly about her personal life and sexuality, connecting what the French feminist Hélène Cixous calls the ‘female body’ with her feminine voice and bringing her sexual desires into her text.’ She died in Karachi just before her 30th birthday and her poems were published posthumously in two critically acclaimed collections, Aankhein (Eyes) and Neend Ka Rang (The Colour of Sleep). What little we know about her creative process is from the fragments of her journals, and through a biography ‘Ek Thi Sara’ (Once, there was Sara) written by her friend, the renowned Indian writer Amrita Pritam. Read more at: sabynjaveri.com