The poet, artist and film-maker Imtiaz Dharker has been awarded an OBE for services to the arts in the 2025 New Year’s Honours List. Dharker was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2014 and became Chancellor of Newcastle University in 2020.

Her seven collections, including the latest, Shadow Reader, have all been published by Bloodaxe. Her poems have been broadcast widely on BBC Radio 3 and 4 as well as the BBC World Service. She has had solo exhibitions of drawings around the world, and scripts and directs video films, many of them for non-government organisations working in the area of shelter, education and health for women and children in India.

She has described herself as a Scottish Muslim Calvinist, who was born in Lahore in 1954 and grew up in Glasgow before eloping with an Indian Hindu to live in Mumbai. She later moved to Britain when she married the late Simon Powell, the founder of Poetry Live!.  At one time she was seen as a contender for poet laureate, but ruled herself out, saying that she “had to weigh the privacy I need to write poems against the demands of a public role”.

She said of her OBE: “This came as a real surprise and I'm happy to accept it as an honour for poets and poetry in this country. In a time when discourse, especially political discourse, is devalued across the world, poetry has a powerful role to play. Poetry has always had a special place here. It's a kind of national language, the language of being human, whatever tongue it is in.”