Usman Awang

Who is Usman Awang?

Usman Awang was a Malaysian poet, playwright and novelist. Malaysian National Laureate. He was born into a penniless family in Johore, and had done coolies and served as a policeman when he was young. He was good at writing traditional Pantun poems. His career began at 1946, and he was a nucleus member of Angkatan Asas 50.

The prominent Malaysian critic Syed Husin Ali, one of his closest friends wrote this: Usman is popularly considered, and most justifiably too, as perhaps the best poet in the Malay language. Most important, he is accepted without question as a people’s poet. Writing since 1955, Usman did not produce a very large corpus of poetry, only about 200 of them. But the man, his personality, his poetry and his ideas have a much deeper and wider influence than that number would suggest. Much of his poems are simple, clear, often romantic, and just beautiful. He is a master at weaving words into striking phrases, sentences and verses that are of exceptional classical beauty and sometimes appear to be nostalgic and even escapist.