Munir Niazi was born at Khanpur in Hoshiarpur district in 1928 and moved to Sahiwal in 1947. He wrote in both Urdu and Punjabi and is among the very few modern poets of the region taken seriously in both.
His poetry is short, spare and full of delay: things that arrive too late, journeys not made, people not spoken to. His most quoted Urdu poem is built entirely on the phrase that he was always late in doing what needed doing.
His Punjabi collections are as substantial as his Urdu and are much less read.
He wrote film songs, including some of the best known in Pakistani cinema, and treated the work without embarrassment.
He was born in Indian Punjab and buried in Pakistani Punjab and wrote about that distance for fifty years without ever making a political statement out of it.
He wrote in Urdu and in Punjabi and refused to treat the second as the lesser. His Punjabi collections were published at Lahore and are still in print there.
The film songs he wrote are standards in Pakistan, and the money from film work paid for the poetry.
He came to India after the border opened to writers and read at gatherings here. He died at Lahore in 2006.