Ahmed Rashid Thani (1963–2012)

Ahmed Rashid Thani started writing poetry in the late 1970s and in 1981 published a collection in colloquial Arabic, establishing him as a forthright modernist in both style and subject matter. This successful volume was republished in the 1990s in an enlarged edition entitled O! You Eat Dates . . . You Collect Gold, and followed by a number of other collections, whose titles include Drowning Verge, Morning Sits next to Sea and Then Night Comes and Takes Me.

His poetry has been published in Arab and local newspapers and magazines, with some poems translated into French and German. He was born in Khorfakkan, UAE, in 1963.

His sudden death in February 2012, at the age of 49, is a great loss to modernist poetry in the UAE.