The Grimoire of Grimalkin

Akhtar performs internationally, with recent highlights including the Medway Festival of Literature, Emirates Festival of Literature, Poetry Wales and Rotterdam Poetry Festival. She studied at Bennington College, Vermont and University of Amherst, Massachusetts and considers herself Pakistani-British-American, something reflected in the linguistic registers of her work. Akhtar has published seven collections of poetry, and her first short story collection, Of Necessity And Wanting was shortlisted for the UBL Prize for Literary Excellence in 2023. Akhtar translated Belles-Lettres: Writings of Hijab Imtiaz Ali, the first translation of Ali's 'Adab-e-Zareen' published by Oxford University Press in 2023. Belles-Lettres which also contains a 20,000 word biographical essay has received an Honourable Mention for the 2024 A.K. Ramanujan Prize for book translations from South Asian languages into English awarded by the Association for Asian Studies. Akhtar is a Creative Writing lecturer at the University of Greenwich.