Born in Lahore, Pakistan in 1954, Moniza Alvi came to England when she was just a few months old. She grew up in Hertfordshire and studied at the Universities of York and London. Her first solo collection, The Country at my Shoulder (1993), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and went on to be shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award. The Independent on Sunday named her next collection, A Bowl of Warm Air (1996), among its Books of the Year. In 2002 she received a Cholmondeley Award for poetry and published her most recent volume Souls to much acclaim - 'delicious, extraordinary poems' was how Kathleen Jamie and Hugo Williams summed up the collection.