Anjum Niaz (1948-2018)

Before joining journalism, Anjum Niaz taught at the Karachi American School and Pakistan American Council. A master’s in English Literature from the Punjab University, she joined the evening paper - The Star - in 1984 before moving to Dawn in 1987. Her father, Fida Hassan, was chief secretary of West Pakistan.

According to Zubeida Mustafa, a former assistant editor at Dawn, while working at The Star, Anjum “won the Population Institute’s Award for Excellence in Population Reporting.”

As Dawn Magazine Editor, Zubeida says, “she injected in it ‘youthfulness and elegance’; two attributes she possessed.”

Zubeida says the Dawn Magazine “reflected her innovative skills and creativity, her love for diversity, her exquisiteness and her English language skills in crafting words and headlines.”

For Muhammad Ali Siddiqui, Dawn’s Readers’ Editor, she was “a hard-working and well-read person” who rose “rapidly in her career, eventually becoming editor of Dawn Magazine.”

In 1993, Anjum moved to Islamabad when her husband was transferred to the capital by his company. He adds: “There she covered the foreign office, besides writing her column, Crème de La Crème, until 1996 when she resigned and moved to America. From the benefit of hindsight, I say her best days as wordsmith came when she was no more a Dawn staffer.”

After she moved to the United States, Anjum wrote a weekly column – View from US – for Dawn.

She died in New Jersey on October 21, 2018.