Shafey Kidwai

Shafey Kidwai (born 8 April 1960) is an Indian academic, bilingual critic, translator, columnist, and author. He is the professor in the Department of Mass Communications at Aligarh Muslim University. He has written twelve books in English and Urdu. His seminal study, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Reason, Religion and Nation (Routledge,2020) has been reviewed many times. He writes for The Hindustan Times, The Indian Express, The Hindu, The Frontline, The Outlook, Indian Literature, The Book Review, The Statesman, and Siyasat.com. Many reputed literary journals of the subcontinent carry his articles regularly and he is often regarded as one of the best modern academic critics in Urdu.

Prof. Shafey Kidwai is the current Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Aligarh Muslim University (from June 26, 2024) . He also serves as the Director of the Sir Syed Academy.

He studied at Lucknow and Varanasi and lives in Aligarh with his wife Shaista Faridi, son Shaghil Kidwai and his elder son Sharif Kidwai works for Apple Inc and settled in the United States . He is a grandson of famous author and scholar Maulana Abdul Majid Daryabadi. He participates in seminars and literary festivals regularly.Shafey kidwai was a member of the General Council of Sahitya academy and National Council for the promotion of Urdu. He was the convener of Bhasha Samiti(Urdu)Saraswati Samman and Bhartiya Jnanpith.

His 2017 work ''Sawaneh-e-Sir Syed: Ek Bazdeed'' - a biography of Sir Syed won the 2019 Sahitya Akademi Award for Urdu. A previous work Urdu Literature and Journalism: Critical Perspective was published by Cambridge University Press India. With this well-researched source of information, Shafey Kidwai has turned a new page in the history of Urdu journalism.

In 2018, Kidwai was awarded the Iqbal Samman by the Government of Madhya Pradesh for his service to promotion of Urdu literature. UP Urdu Academy has also conferred its highest literary honour Khusro Award to him in 2018. He is a bilingual critic and communication expert and his fortnightly column on literature, Culture and media Going Native appears in the Friday Review, The Hindu. He is the chief editor of Aligarh Journal of Communication and he is on the editorial board of several peer-reviewed communicational journals including research journal jointly published by University of Purdue and Kolkata. Provided by Wikipedia