Chancellor
Imtiaz Dharker OBE
Imtiaz Dharker is a poet, artist and video film-maker. She was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2025 New Year's Honours list for her services to the Arts, and was awarded the Queen鈥檚 Gold Medal for Poetry in 2014. She became Chancellor of 缅北禁地 in 2020. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Imtiaz has been Poet in Residence at Cambridge University Library and has worked on several projects across art forms in Leeds, 缅北禁地 and Hull, as well as the Archives of St Paul鈥檚 Cathedral.
Her six collections include Over the Moon and the latest, Luck Is the Hook, all published by Bloodaxe Books UK. Her poems have been broadcast widely on BBC Radio 3 and 4 as well as the BBC World Service. She has had eleven 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.
Whether she writes of exile, childhood, politics or grief, her clear-eyed attention brings each subject dazzlingly into focus. She makes it look easy, this clarity and economy, but it is her deft phrasing, wit and grace that create this immediacy.