Adrian A. Husain

Adrian A Husain (born Syed Akbar Husain) is a Pakistani poet, Shakespearean scholar, and literary journalist. He was also the 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. He received a PhD from the University of East Anglia in 1993 for a thesis on Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Castiglione.

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, edited by Mitali P. Wong and M. Yousuf Saeed, contains an essay on Husain's verse. He wrote Elegy for Benazir Bhutto in 2011. Husain has stated his aspiration to write verse that transcends time and space, rather than specifically Pakistani ethnic poetry.