The future actually looked bright for young Daud Haider, who was born into a large and wealthy family of poets and writers in what was then East Bengal, and now Bangladesh.

A rising star of the local poetry scene, in 1973 one of his works won "The Best Poem of Asia" award handed out by the London Society of Poetry.

But just a year later, a single poem criticizing religion, which led to allegations of offending people's religious sentiments, forever changed the life of the then 22-year-old Haider.

He was arrested and a few months later put on a plane to Kolkata in India.

He lived the rest of his life under the shadow of a fatwa.

Haider became one of the earliest and most prominent authors from South Asia to have faced the wrath of religious groups, long before his fellow writers Salman Rushdie and Taslima Nasreen.

The pain of having to spend........

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