KARACHI, Oct 11: Noted poet and renowned man of letters Shanul Haq Haqqee died from complications of lung cancer in Canada on Tuesday. He was 88. Mr Haqqee leaves five sons and one daughter. Like his wife, well-respected teacher Salma Haqqee who died exactly two years ago, he will be buried in Toronto, Canada, where five of his children were by his side when he died in his sleep.

Born in Delhi on Dec 15, 1917, Mr Haqqee did his BA from Aligarh Muslim University. He obtained a Master’s degree in English literature from the famous St Stephen’s College.

Growing up as he did in a city steeped in history and culture, Mr Haqqee recited his first ghazal at an annual poetic gathering of St Stephen’s College. His two anthologies of poems, Taar-i-Pairahan (1957) and Harf-i-Dilras (1979), testify to his refined poetic taste. Dil ki Zubaan is a selection of his hundred ghazals.

Mr Haqqee tried his hand at other — and relatively little known — genres of poetry, such as ‘Peheylian’ and ‘Kehmukarnian’, which were published in a collection, Nazr-i-Khusru. He also composed Qitat-i-Tareekhi and poems for children, which were published by the Hamdard Foundation in a book called Phool khilay hain rang birangey. He wrote musicals for Radio Pakistan in the early 1950s.

His gripping memoirs were serialized by the prestigious literary magazine Afkaar in 41 parts in the 1980s and the 1990s.

In addition to his regular professional duties at the department of films and publications and the marketing department of Pakistan Television, Mr Haqqee remained associated with the Urdu Lughat Board for 17 long years — from 1958 to 1975 — untiringly doing the spadework for what would be a monumental 24-volume dictionary, with each volume consisting of an average of a thousand pages.

A couple of years ago, he completed the translation of the eighth edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, which first came out in 1911.

Mr Haqqee also wrote literary criticism. His books on the subject — Nukta-i-Raaz and Naqd-o-Nigarish — are still considered specimens of landmark research.