Ammar Aziz

Ammar Aziz is a bilingual poet, literary translator, and multi-award-winning filmmaker. His debut poetry collection, The Missing Prayer, was published simultaneously in Pakistan and India in 2025 to wide critical acclaim. His poetry has appeared in leading literary journals and has been widely anthologized, including in Penguin’s Greening the Earth and The Red River Book of Erotic Poetry. He has participated in major international literature and art festivals, and his poems have been translated into several languages, including Russian, Spanish, Bangla, Tamil, and Kannada. As a filmmaker, Aziz has screened his work in over a hundred countries. His feature-length documentaries A Walnut Tree (IDFA, Amsterdam, 2015) and Discount Workers (One World, Prague, 2020) have received numerous international awards, including the FIPRESCI Award, the Grand Prix at the Moscow International Film Festival, the Ram Bahadur Award at Film Southasia, and the Jean Rouch International Award, among others. His films have been acquired by Al Jazeera and other global broadcasters and widely covered by international media. Ammar lives in Lahore, where he is a visiting faculty member at Beaconhouse National University, co-founder of the non-profit SAMAAJ, and founding curator of ZQ Gallery. He was awarded the prestigious Berlinale Footprints at the Berlin International Film Festival for an animation-based child abuse prevention initiative produced by SAMAAJ. He has recently completed his third feature film and is currently working on a micro-fiction project, an English ghazal collection, and the first official English translation of Urdu poet Jaun Elia—a project he began as an artist-in-residence at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany.