Daniyal Mueenuddin

Daniyal Mueenuddin Poems

Daniyal Mueenuddin Biography

Daniyal Mueenuddin (Urdu: دانیال معین الدین‎) (born 1963) is a Pakistani-American author who writes in English. His short-story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, has been translated into sixteen languages, and won The Story Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and other honors and critical acclaim. Born in Los Angeles, USA, he spent his childhood in Pakistan. At the age of thirteen he moved to the USA, where he received higher education and worked as a journalist, a director, a lawyer, a businessman, before finally devoting his efforts to writing. Mueenuddin was born in Los Angeles, USA, to a Pakistani father Ghulam Mueenuddin and a second-generation Norwegian-American mother, Barbara. His father was a member of the Indian Civil Service (ICS), and after the independence of Pakistan in 1947 he became Secretary of Pakistan's Establishment Division, which administered the civil service (later he was the country's Chief Election Commissioner). In the late 1950s, Mueenuddin's father was posted for several years to Washington as chief negotiator of the Indus Waters Treaty (1960) between India and Pakistan where he met his future American wife Barbara, a reporter at The Washington Post. After a courtship and marriage they moved to Pakistan in 1960, living first in Rawalpindi and later in Lahore. Keeping with an agreement she had made with her father, a surgeon in Los Angeles who had heard of unsanitary conditions in Pakistani hospitals, his expectant mother flew back to the U.S. and Mueenuddin was born in Los Angeles in April. Two months later mother and child returned to Rawalpindi, Pakistan, then the country's temporary capital. Several years later, the family moved to Lahore, where Mueenuddin attended the Lahore American School. Mueenuddin remembers his youth there as a "magical" time which included hunting and riding. Mueenuddin and his brother Tamur often visited the US in the summers. At age 13 his parents separated and the two boys moved with their mother back to the US, where Mueenuddin spent five years at prep-school, Groton School in MA, graduating in 1981. Later he graduated magna cum laude from Dartmouth College. The summer of his graduation he returned to Pakistan where his father, in his 80s was in failing health, and losing control of the prosperous family mango farm to its managers. His father asked him to stay in Pakistan and rescue the farm. Mueenuddin recalled it as a lonely and arduous life, but one well suited to Daniyal, who spent early mornings writing poetry, and evenings reading through the library that his mother had left behind. (Later in life Mueenuddin would thank his mother for teaching him "that becoming a writer was a legitimate thing to do." His mother was a Trustee of PEN American Center and died in October 2009.) In 1990 his father died, leaving Mueenuddin more exposed but also more independent. He ran the farm as a business, and not in the traditional feudal way like many of his neighbors, by "hiring good managers, paying them well, and demanding a lot of them." Mueenuddin would also later inherit his mother's family farm in Wisconsin.)

The Best Poem Of Daniyal Mueenuddin

TRYING TRIPE

Three months this man's been off the farm -
go back now, back to diesel, earth and pumps.
Sugar cane I planted has come to term,
and now I count the stalks, the germination.
One clump is a penny, one row,
running, I will sell it for one dollar,
this field buys an olive suit, numerous books
boxed…

Daniyal Mueenuddin Comments