Ghulam Nabi Firaq

Professor Ghulam Nabi Firaq (15 July 1927 – 17 December 2016) was a Kashmiri poet, writer and an educationist. From the last fifty years he had been writing poetry and prose. In doing so he used, besides traditional ones, several poetic forms including blank verse, free verse, sonnets, quatrains, metric poems and lyrics. He also translated dozens of English poems of outstanding English poets into Kashmiri. As a result of all this, he enriched the expression of the language and made it more suitable for communicating his sensibility which in nature is modern. Besides, he had been writing essays and articles in Kashmiri language, which was his mother tongue, and which he had made the vehicle of expression from early fifties. As a literary critic and historian he had been trying to evaluate the Kashmiri poetry of the last five hundred years and rehabilitate it by bringing to prominence among other things its intrinsic merit and power of expression. He also holds the Sahitya Akademi Award for his works in Kashmiri literature. He is regarded as one of the very few people of Kashmir who has been trying to preserve the rich Kashmiri culture, heritage and language.
As an educationist he tried his best to reach all sections of society to help them in uplifting their educational standards. He was co-founder of Standard Public High School (a group of Educational Institutions), established in 1975.