Shiv Kumar Batalvi was born in 1936 at Bara Pind Lohtian in Shakargarh tehsil, then in Gurdaspur district, later in Sialkot district and now in Narowal district in Pakistan. He came across in 1947 and grew up at Batala.
He wrote lyric poetry of grief and wrote it fast. Loona, 1965, a verse play retelling the Puran Bhagat story from Luna's side and treating her as a young woman married to an old king and blamed for the consequence, won him the Sahitya Akademi award in 1967 at thirty-one, the youngest recipient the award has had.
His poems were set to music and sung across Punjab in his own lifetime and have been recorded by every generation of Punjabi singer since. Ki puchhde ho haal faqiran da and Maye ni maye are known by people who have never read a book of poetry.
He drank heavily and died in 1973 at thirty-six, of liver disease, at his in-laws' house at Kiri Mangial.
He is treated in Punjab as the archetype of the poet who burns out, which has flattened him. Loona is a serious piece of moral argument and it is more than the biography around it.
He worked as a patwari and then in a bank, and he read at mushairas and on All India Radio, where the recordings that carried him to a mass audience were made.
He is the poet of birha, of longing and separation, and the accusation against him has always been that the grief is a pose. The counter is that he died at thirty-six.
He was recorded singing his own poems and those recordings are what most people know him by. He remains the most read Punjabi poet of the last century.