PESHAWAR, Jan 5: Murad Shinwari, famous Pashto poet, is in dire need of financial help to continue his treatment at the Khyber Teaching Hospital where he was admitted after suffering stroke on Wednesday night.

It is the second time the 83-year-old poet has been hospitalised in the past two years but no assistance has been given to him.

His son Sajjad Ali, who said that his appeals for treatment of his father hadn’t found receptive ears two years ago when his father suffered first attack, hoped that the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Information and Culture Minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain, who had helped literary personalities in recent past, would also extend financial assistance to continue his father’s treatment.

“My father receives pension from Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation where he served as script-writer but that was too little to bear cost of his treatment,” his  son Sajjad  Ali said.

He said the government had disappointed them when they appealed to it for help when his father had a stroke two years ago.

Murad Shinwari was born in 1928 at Landi Kotal to Amir Hamza Khan Shinwari known as Baba-i-Pashto Ghazal, got his early education from Peshawar followed by a university degree in Pashto, received gold medal for his good work as librarian, lexicographer and translator at University of Peshawar.

Murad Shinwari is considered as the pioneer of Azad Nazm (free verse) in Pashto. He is author of several books in Pashto like Palwashay (short stories collection), Da Khyber Adab, and two plays of Shakespeare and selected poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson in versified form in Pashto.

Murad Shinwari has written screen plays and songs for more than hundred popular Pashto films in its golden era in which he projected Pakhtun culture in its true spirit and letter.