Afzal Ahmed Syed, born in Ghazipur, India in 1946 is a leading contemporary Urdu poet and translator. He is known for his mastery of the Urdu language and poetic expression in both classic and modern sense. He has lived since 1976 in Karachi, Pakistan, where he works as an entomologist. He has published three collections of Free Verses and Prose Poems and one collection of Ghazals. His collected works were published as Mitti ki Kaan in 2009. In 2010, the Wesleyan University Press, USA, published a selection of his poems, Rococo and Other Worlds, translated by Musharraf Ali Farooqi. Translations of his poetry have also been published in Sindhi, Hindi, Bengali, Arabic and German. He was one of the first Urdu translators of Gabriel Garcia Marquez  and Jean Genet.In India, translations of his poetry have been published in Hindi in 1992 and in Bengali in 2010. He frequently translates from English and Persian and has a strong command over the languages, built over the course of his on-going career. His translations of the Sabak-e-Hindi poets appeared in Dunyazad, Karachi.His translation of the complete Persian works of Mir Taqi Mir was published by Oxford University Press under the title Divan-e-Mir Farsi Mein Urdu Tarjuma. It’s interesting to note that Afzal Syed had witnessed Civil Wars in Beirut in the 1970s during his stay there as a university student as well as Dhaka in 1971. His work has been widely published in leading Urdu literary periodicals such as Shabkhoon, Aaj, and Dunyazad etc. He currently teaches at Habib University.