ISLAMABAD, 11 July 2006 — Pakistan’s leading playwright, poet and columnist Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi died in Lahore yesterday. He was 90.
Qasmi was suffering from various ailments for quite some time. He was hospitalized several days ago. He remained associated with daily Jang for most of his life.
Born in Khushab on Nov. 20, 1916, Qasmi graduated from the Punjab University and started his career as a clerk. He then switched over to journalism and excelled in creative and literary fields.
Although better known as a poet who mastered both the traditional ghazal and the modern-day “nazm”, he was also one of the leading Urdu short-story writers as well as a highly respected critic.
Qasmi headed the Majlis-e-Tarak-i-Adab, an autonomous body for the promotion of literature, for more than two and a half decades.
With some 50 books of poetry, fiction, journalism and art to his credit, Qasmi was a major figure in contemporary Urdu literature. He stands out among his contemporaries due mainly to his unflinching humanism. Qasmi is considered second only to Prem Chand in masterful depiction of rural culture in Urdu short story. For the past 40 years, he published and edited the prestigious literary journal “Funoon”, which has groomed more than one generation of new writers.
