Imtiaz Dharker was born in Lahore, Pakistan, and moved to Glasgow, Scotland, when she was less than a year old. She went to university in Glasgow and then moved to Bombay where she has since been based – although she does spend many months a year in London. It is from this life of transitions that she draws many of her themes: childhood, exile, journeying, home and religious strife. In Purdah (published in 1989 and forming half of her Bloodaxe collection Postcards from God, 1997) she is a traveller between cultures. In Postcards from God she imagines an anguished God surveying a world stricken by fundamentalism. Her more recent collections are I Speak for the Devil (2001), and The Terrorist at My Table (2006).

As well as writing poetry, she is also an artist. All the ink drawings in the poetry collections are reproductions of her works, although originally they are extremely large. She is also a well-known documentary film maker in India, producing, with her team, about ten films a year.