Vancouver-based DesiPOC author Tāriq Malik has worked across poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and visual arts for the past four decades to distill immersive and original narratives. He writes intensely in response to the world in flux around him and to his place in its shadows.

Born in Pakistani Punjab, he came reluctantly late to these shores, having to first survive three wars, two migrations, and two decades of slaving in the Kuwaiti desert before landing here. In Canada, his many careers have included chemical engineering and a lifetime as a marginalized poet/writer of fiction and aspiring cinematographer.

He doggedly believes in his passion for distilling the alchemy of light/chroma/pixel/text, which can all be happily and gainfully combined. He loves landscapes, bodies of living water large and small, and readers and listeners equally, and he claims he writes so that he has something to read to his tribe on Open Mike Nights, at the local Poet's Corner, or on the hallowed grounds of libraries.

He sums up his life as poetry by other means. He considers himself a serial mudskipper cast in this incarnation as a narrative voice of the voyages of the global mohajir/refu-jee.

Focusing on Vancouver and the Pacific Northwest, he reframes the familiar by teasing fresh and unexpected perspectives on the local intersectionality with historical and post-colonial India in general and Punjab's province in particular. He claims his working English is a borrowed tongue inflected with his inherited Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi, and Arabic languages.

He is the author of a collection of short stories, Rainsongs of Kotli, a novel Chanting Denied Shores, UBC Press's Unmooring the Komagata Maru - Charting Colonial Trajectories (Poetry section), and his poetry collections from Caitlin Press Exit Wounds, and Blood of Stone. He is currently working on an autobiography and his next novel Blood Towers, which presents an ant's POV of constructing glass pyramids in the Arabian desert.

His writing has appeared or will soon appear in the Salzburg Poetry Review (#43), The Polyglot Magazine, Ricepaper Magazine, The Puritan, TWUC’s Write Magazine, The Aleph Review, and Verbal Art (July 2019), among others.

Even though his published work challenges entanglements in the barbed wires of boundaries, he seems to have finally found 'home' in downtown Vancouver, where he now spends his free time hiking and 'moving to the sound of water' and capturing these on his YouTube channel This Lit Life, he has no plans to move elsewhere.

He has been the Writer-in-Residence at the Historic Joy Kogawa House (July 2023).

Tāriq Malik's poetry is also heavily influenced by his re-readings of the many splendored works of the Warsan Shire, Dionne Brand, Souvankham Thammavongsa, Andrea Cohen, Annie Dillard, Galway Kinnell, Wallace Stevens, and TS Eliot, among others; and by his partiality to Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Mirza Ghalib, in Urdu, and Laeeq Babri, Shiv Kumar Batalvi and Bhulleh Shah in Punjabi.