Kishwar Naheed () (born 1940) is a feminist Urdu poet and a writer from Pakistan. She has written several poetry books. She has also received awards including Sitara-e-Imtiaz for her literary contribution towards Urdu literature. Early life Kishwar Naheed was born in 1940 to a Syed family in Bulandshahr, India. She migrated to Lahore, Pakistan after partition in 1949 with her family. Kishwar was a witness to the violence (including rape and abduction of women) associated with the partition of India. The bloodshed at that time left a lasting impression on her at a tender age. As a young girl, Kishwar was inspired by the girls who had started going to Aligarh Muslim University in those times. The white kurta and white gharara under a black burqa that they wore looked so elegant to her and she wanted to go to college, to educate herself. She finished Adeeb Fazil degree in Urdu and learned Persian language also. She had become a voracious reader in her teenage years and read everything that she chanced upon — ranging from the works of Dostoyevsky to the English dictionary published by Neval Kishore Press. She struggled and fought to receive education, when women were not allowed to go to school. She studied at home and received a high school diploma through correspondence courses. After matriculation, there was a lot of family resistance to her taking admission in college but her brother, Syed Iftikhar Zaidi, paid for her tuition and helped her continue her formal education. In Pakistan she went on to obtain Bachelor of Arts in 1959 and master's in economics in 1961 from Punjab University, Lahore. Kishwar married her friend and a poet Yousuf Kamran and the couple have two sons. After her husband's death, she worked to raise her children and support the family. Career Kishwar Naheed has 12 volumes of her poetry published from both Pakistan and India. Her Urdu poetry has also been published in foreign languages all over the world. Her famous poem 'We Sinful Women' (), affectionately referred to as a women's anthem among Pakistani feminists, gave its title to a groundbreaking anthology of contemporary Urdu feminist poetry, translated and edited by Rukhsana Ahmad and published in London by The Women's Press in 1991. Kishwar Naheed has also written eight books for children and has won the prestigious UNESCO award for children's literature. Her love for children is