Prof. Kaiser Hamidul Haq

Kaiser Haq is a poet, essayist and translator with long experience as a university teacher of English. His areas of special interest include Twentieth Century Literature, especially poetry and the literature of the First World War; the Essay; Third World Literature, especially the literature of the Indian subcontinent; creative writing.

Discussions of Haq’s poetry may be seen in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English; The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry in English; Contemporary Poets (St. James Press, USA), Dictionary of literary Biography (volume on South Asian literature in English, ed. Fakrul Alam).

Professional Designation:
Professor of English,
Department of English and Humanities, University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh

Professor (On Leave)
Department of English, University of Dhaka

Placed First in the First Class in the B.A. Honours (1972) and M.A. (1973) examinations of the Department of English, University of Dhaka.

Attended an Institute on American Literature of the 1920’s held in May 1977 in Madras, India, under the auspices of the U.S. Educational Foundation in India, and received the overall Grade ‘A’.

Completed the requirements for the degree of Ph.D. in English Literature at the University of Warwick, England, in 1981. Title of these: ‘Frederic Manning: A Critical and Biographical Study’. Supervisor Professor Bernard Bergonzi.

Other Academic and Literaty Activities:

• Participated in international conferences and seminars held in Dhaka, Lahore, Jaipur, Hong Kong, Singapore, Milwaukee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cambridge (The British Council’s English Studies Seminar, 1986), Oxford (The British Council’s Seminar on Literature Teaching Overseas, 1995), Durham, Bamberg (Germany), Kathmandu, Delhi.
• Judge for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia region), 1994.
• Judge for the Singapore National Arts Council’s biannual short story contest in English (Co-sponsored by the Singapore Press Holdings), 1995. I also gave readings and conducted a writing workshop.
• Regional Chairperson for Eurasia for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, 1996 and 1997.
• Fellow, Hawthornden Castle International Writers Retreat, May-June 2000.
• Fellow, Ledig House International Writers Colony, Ghent, New York, August-October 2000.
• “Café Poet” (Resident Poet) at the Poetry Café of the Poetry Society of Great Britain, London, Summer, 2002.

PUBLICATIONS:

Books (Poetry):

Published in the Streets of Dhaka: Collected Poems (Dhaka: Writers. Ink, 2007); second, expanded edition, forthcoming from University Press Ltd. (UPL)

The Logopathic Reviewer’s Song and Other Pieces (Aark Arts, London and UPL, Dhaka, 2002).

Black Orchid, London: Aark Arts, 1996.

A Happy Farewell, Dhaka: UPL, 1994

Starting Lines, Dhaka, 1978.

A Little Ado, Dhaka, 1978.

Selected Poems of Shamsur Rahman (trans.), Dhaka: BRAC, 1985. (Enlarged edition, Dhaka: Pathak Samabesh, 2008)
 
Contemporary Indian Poetry (editor), Ohio State University Press, 1990

Padma Meghna Jamuna: Modern Poetry from Bangladesh (editor), FOSWAL, Delhi, 2009.

Collected Poems of Shahid Suhrawardy (editor), forthcoming from UPL, Dhaka.

Calcutta 1971 and Other Poems, a selection of Kaiser Haq’s poems, translated into Oriya by Sangram Jha, Bhubaneswar: Arya Vedanta Publications, 2010.
 
Books (Prose):
      
Quartet (trans. of Tagore’s Chaturanga), Heinemann, U.K., 1993

The Wonders of Vilayet (trans. of the first Indian travel book on Europe), Peepal Tree Books, Leeds, 2002 (A section, titled ‘Passage to Scotland’, excerpted in The Scotsman). New edition: Delhi, Chroniclebooks, 2007.

Quartet, revised, in Tagore Omnibus, Vol. 1, Penguin India, 2005, and in Classic Rabindranath, Penguin India 2011

Selected Stories of Anis Choudhury (trans.), Writers.Ink, Dhaka, 2011)

Urukkoo: The Woman Who Flew (trans. of Nasreen Jahan’s novel), forthcoming from Penguin India.

Articles and Reviews:

In London Magazine:

• “Forgotten Fred: A Portrait of Frederic Manning,” Vol. 23, Nos. 9 & 10, December 1983/January 1984.                 
• “More in Water than in Air: Notes from the Third-Class World,” Vol. 26, Nos. 1 & 2, April/May 1986.
• Review of Frederic Manning’s Her Privates We, Vol. 27, Nos. 1 & 2, April/May 1987.
• “Gunter Grass and the Troubled Hills,” Vol. 29, Nos. 1 & 2, April/May 1989.
• Review of Valcav Havel’s Disturbing the Peace, Vol.  31, Nos. 1 & 2, April/May 1991.
• Review of E. M. Cioran’s A Short History of Decay and The Temptation to Exist, Vol. 31, Nos. 7 & 8, November 1991.
• “Reviewing Tagore,” Vol. 31, Nos. 9 & 10, December 1991/January 1992.
• “Scandal in Paradise,” review of Rozsa Hajnoclay’s Fire of Bengal, Vol. 34, Nos. 5 & 6, August/September 1994.
• “A Pleasant Enough Decade,” review of P. Vansittart’s In the Fifties, Vol. 35, Nos. 5 & 6, August/September 1995.
• “Too Bad for Tagore,” review of Rabindranath Tagore, Vol. 36, No. 7 and 8, October-November 1996.
• “A Malgudi Life,” a review article on R. K. Narayan, Vol. 5 and 6, August-September 1997.
• “Asian Voices,” review of four Asian poets (forthcoming)
• “Aesthetes,” a review of Charles Tomlinson and Francis Ponge, February-March 2000/
• “Modern Masters” December/January 2001.

In The Journal of Commonwealth Literature:

• “The Poetry of Frederic Manning,” Vol. xx, No. 1, 1985.

In Chapman (Edinburgh):

• “By the Crumbling Wall: Berlin Notes,” Nos. 61-62, Autumn 1990.

In South Asia Research (Oxford):

• “Easeful Death,” review article on Tagore, Summer 1997.

In The Dhaka University Studies:

• “Some Notes on the Auden Group,” Vol. xxv, December 1976.
• “The Hemingway Code,” Vol. xxvii, December 1977.
• “Artifice and Ideology in Hard Times,” Vol. xxxvi, June 1982.
• ‘The Great War and Ford Madox Ford’, Vol. 42, No. 2, December 1985.
• “The Great War as Apocalypse in Lawrence’s Minor Writings,” Vol. 43, No. 2, December 1986.
• “Contemporary American Poetry: Geneology and Trends,” Vol. 45, No. 1, June 1988.
• “Manning’s War Novel and the War Books Controversy,” Vol. 45, No. 2, December 1988.
• “Frederic Manning’s Scenes and Portraits: An Out of the Way Modern Classic,” Vol. 46, No. 2, December 1989.
• “The Great Canadian War Novel,” Vol. 48, No. 1, June 1991.

In the Bulletin of the International Association of University Professors of English:

• “Spirit and Personality: Coming to Terms with Rabindranath Tagore,” 1999.

In Form: A Magazine of the Arts:

• “Salman Rushdie and the Rise of the Indo-Anglian Novel,” No. 1, Winter 1982.
• “The Good Soldier and Women in Love as War Novels,” No. 3, Autumn 1984.
• “Pakistani Patriarchs: Salman Rushdie’s Shame,” No. 3, Autumn 1984.

In The Bangla Academy Journal:

• “The Great War and D. H. Lawrence,” Vols. xii-xiii, 1985-86.

In The Bangladesh Journal of American Studies:

• ‘American Impact on Bengali and Indo-Anglian Poetry’, Vol. 2, Summer 1988.

In Nibandhamala (Journal of the Centre for Advanced Research in the Humanities, Dhaka University):

• “Frederic Manning and Modern Criticism,” June 1989.

In Crossings (ULAB):

• “Some Thoughts on Tagore as a Thinker”. Vol 1, No.1 (2008)
• “The Late Mr. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, C.B.E. (Hony.) and the Twilight of Empire”, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2009).

In the Metropolitan University Journal:

• “Ancestral Voices: The Transition to Modernity in Indian English Poetry”, Vol 1, No.1 (2007)

Miscellaneous Publications:

• Poems and translations in London Magazine, Chapman (Edinburgh), New Quest (India), Midland Poetry Worksheet (Leicester), Poetry from Warwick(Warwick), Interarts (Edinburgh), Form (Dhaka), Bangla Academy Journal (Dhaka), Horizon (Chittagong), Wasafiri (UK), The Main Street Journal (London), Literature Matters (London), Literature Alive (India), World Literature Written in English (Singapore), Catamaran (USA), Drunken Boat (online: USA), Brooklyn Voice (online: USA), Transnational Literatures (Australia).
• Contributor to The Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English; Contemporary Literary Criticism (USA); The Blackwell Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre (forthcoming), Contemporary Literary Criticism (USA), Dictionary of literary Biography (South Asian literature in English, ed. Fakrul Alam).

Translations of Bengali poems anthologised in Traveller’s Literary Companion: The Indian subcontinent, London: In Print Publishing 1996.

Essays and reviews in Jamini: an International Quarterly of the Arts.

Essays and reviews in The Asiatic (Malaysia), Biblio (Delhi), Indian Horizons.

Contributor to The Essential Tagore, edited by Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty, Harvard U. P., 2011.

Poems anthologized in:

• Stories from South Asia, John Welch, ed., OUP, England, 1989.
• The Worlds of Muslim Imagination, A. Hashmi, ed., Islamabad, 1986.
• Imagine, Oslo, 1990.
• The Arnold Anthology of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, ed., John Thieme.  London: Arnold, 1996.
• New Voices in Post-Independence South Asian Writing, eds., Victor Ramraj, et. al., Delhi, DOABA, 2001.
• Masala, ed. Debjani Chatterji, London: Macmillan, 2005.
• Sweet and Sour Dreams, ed. Ajeet Cour, Delhi: Foundation of SAARC Writers and Literature, 2010.
• Poems included in school anthologies published from Delhi and Cuttack, India.
• Prose anthologized in:
• Contributor to The Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English; Contemporary Literary Criticism (USA); The Blackwell Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre.
• “Gunter Grass in Dhaka,” in Martin Kampchen, ed., My Broken Love: Gunter Grass in India and Bangladesh, Delhi, Viking, 2000.
• “The Times They’re a-Changing, Even in an LDC: Musings on English Studies from Dhaka,” in Herbert Grabes, ed. Innovation and Continuity in English Studies. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2001.
• “The Local and the Global in Bangladeshi Literature”, in Together We Survive. Delhi: Foundation of SAARC Writers and Literature, 2010.
• “A Poet at Large: The Travel Writings of Raindranath Tagore” in Stierstorfer, ed. Return to Postmodernism. Heidelberg University Press, 2005.
• The Daily Star Book of Bangladeshi Writing, 2005.

MEMBERSHIP OF LEARNED SOCIETIES:
Life Member, Asiatic Society of Bangladesh.
Life Member, Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, USA.
Former Member, International Association of University Professors of English.

EDITORIAL EXPERIENCE:
Editor, Bangladesh Journal of American Studies
Editorial Consultant for the Banglapedia
Former Member, Editorial Board, Jamini: An International Quarterly of the Arts
Former Member, Editorial Board, ICE Today
Member, Editorial Board, Form: A Magazine of the Arts (Dhaka), 1982-86.
Member, Editorial Board, Art: A Quarterly Journal (Dhaka), 1993-95.
Editor, Dhaka University Studies (Journal of the Faculty of Arts), 1999-2001
Co-Editor, Six Seasons Review, Dhaka, UPL (2001-2002).