Shamsur Rahman Faruqi (Urdu: شمس الرحمٰن فاروقی‎) (born January 15, 1935) is an Indian poet and one of the leading Urdu critics and theorists. He is regarded as the T.S. Eliot of Urdu criticism and has formulated fresh models of literary appreciation. He absorbed western principles of literary criticism and subsequently applied them to Urdu literature, but only after adapting them to address literary aesthetics native to Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. He was born on 15 January 1935 in India. He received his Master of Arts (MA) degree in English from Allahabad University in 1955.
He began writing in 1960. Initially he worked for the Indian postal service (1960-1968), and then as a chief postmaster-general and member of the Postal Services Board, New Delhi until 1994. He was also editor of his literary magazine Shabkhoon and part-time professor at the South Asia Regional Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania. An expert in classical prosody and ‘ilm-e bayan (the science of poetic discourse), he has contributed to modern literary discourse with a profundity rarely seen in contemporary Urdu critics. He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards. Most recently he was awarded the prestigious Saraswati Samman for his work She`r-e Shor-Angez, a four-volume study of the eighteenth-century poet Mir Taqi Mir.
He was awarded the Saraswati Samman, a prestigious literary award in India in 1996.