Adrian A. Husain

Adrian A Husain (born Syed Akbar Husain) is a Pakistani poet, Shakespearean scholar, and literary journalist. He was also founding Chairman of the civil rights think tank Dialogue: Pakistan prior to the return of democracy in 2008.

Life

Educated in England, Italy, and Switzerland, he received his BA Hons. degree in English Literature from the University of Oxford in 1963. He won the Guinness Poetry Prize for a poem titled 'House at Sea' in 1968, and he received a PhD from the University of East Anglia for a thesis on Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Castiglione in 1993.

Work

He is the author of Politics and Genre in Hamlet, published by Oxford University Press in 2004. His collection of verse, Desert Album, was published as part of the Golden Jubilee Series in 1997 by Oxford University Press to coincide with Pakistan's Golden Jubilee in 1997. He also published a collection of sonnets, Italian Window, in 2017.

A recent publication, The Changing World of Contemporary South Asian Poetry in English: A Collection of Critical Essays, Mitali P. Wong (ed.) and M. Yousuf Saeed (ed.), contains an essay on Husain's verse. When Husain wrote his Elegy for Benazir Bhutto in 2011, the late Pakistani writer Khalid Hasan described him as the finest living poet writing in English. He has said that he aspires to write verse that transcends time and space, rather than specifically Pakistani ethnic poetry.