Parveen Shakir is widely considered to be the greatest Urdu female poet. She was born in Karachi - Pakistan on 24 November 1952 and started writing both prose and poetry at an early age, contributing columns to newspapers and articles to English dailies. Shakir published 5 books of poetry to great acclaim, the first being 'Khushbu' ['Fragrance'] (1976), followed by 'Sad Barg' ['Marsh Marigold'] (1980), 'Khud Kalami' ['Soliloquy'], 'Inkar' ['Denial'] (1990), and 'Kaf e Aina' ['The Mirror's Edge'] besides a collection of her newspaper columns entitled 'Gosha e Chashm' ['The Sight Corner']. She...

'About Time' offers unexpected human emotion mixed with scores of intelligent references extracted from Qayoom's dual-sided heaven of death and life, perspectives from inside Christian and Muslim doctrines looking outwards, even right and left brains. Offering his reader a sense of balance in strife, in love and most everyone's preoccupation with expressing himself, Qayoom replaces our eyes with his. If there is not one heaven, Qayoom's reader has no choice but to enter the other, continuing his days in hope despite how bleak a moment may seem.