Qateel Shifai

Born Muhammad Aurangzeb in Haripur, he came from a family with no literary tradition and lost his father young, abandoning formal schooling for a string of small ventures before poetry claimed him. He took the takhallus 'Shifai' in 1938 in honour of his first mentor, the hakeem and poet Yahya Shifa Khanpuri, and later studied under Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi.

In 1947 he entered the Lahore film industry, and over the following decades became one of the most prolific lyricists the subcontinent has known, writing for some two hundred Pakistani and Indian films. What made him unusual is that the film fame and the literary standing reinforced each other rather than cancelling out: he could write a mass-appeal geet and a finely-made ghazal with the same hand, and serious poets respected both.

He championed his mother tongue too, producing the first-ever Hindko film, and his verse has been translated into languages from Russian to Chinese. A street in Lahore and a neighbourhood in Haripur now carry his name — a poet who stayed, to the end, the people's romantic.