Ian Iqbal Rashid (born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania) is a poet, screenwriter and filmmaker known in particular for his volumes of poetry, for the TV series Sort Of and This Life and the feature films Touch of Pink and How She Move. Life Of Indian ancestry and raised in the Ismaili Muslim faith, Rashid's family lived in colonial East Africa for generations. Different years of birth are given for Rashid in different sources, but academic work gives the year as 1968. In the early 1970s, his family was forced to leave Tanzania. After failing to secure asylum in the UK and US, they settled in Toronto. Rashid began his career as an arts journalist, critic, curator, and events programmer, particularly focussed on South Asian diasporic, Muslim and LGBTQ cultural work. In the early 1990s, Rashid returned to London, Britain, where he met his partner, the writer, curator, and academic Peter Ride. He then won a bursary to attend a prestigious BBC writing internship programme Black Screen and soon after started working in film and television as a screenwriter, director and producer. He currently divides his time between Canada and the UK. Works Television and radio Rashid is best known for the iconic BBC show, This Life for which he won a Writer's Guild of Great Britain award, and the current critical hit and Peabody Awards winning series Sort Of, which appeared on many best of end-of-year lists after it dropped on CBC and HBO Max in late 2021. For Sort Of, he has been nominated for best comedy series writer at the 10th Canadian Screen Awards and the 2022 Writers Guild of Canada award for the episode "Sort Of Mary Poppins". Rashid began working as a writer in UK television in the late 1990s, trained on the BBC's Black Screen internship. His early credits include Dilly Downtown, and the soap London Bridge (Carlton Television for ITV) along with the BAFTA and Royal Television Society award winner, This Life. For BBC's Woman's Hour Programme, Rashid wrote and directed Leaving Normal, a comedy serial about same-sex adoption starring Imelda Staunton and Meera Syal. Rashid has created and is currently writing a family dramedy for Amazon Prime Video as well as a young adult fantasy series for the CBC. He is currently co-executive producer and writer on the second season of Sort Of, for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and HBO Max. In