Moniza Alvi left Pakistan for England when a few months old. In her early work, she drew on real and imagined homelands in poems which are 'vivid, witty and imbued with unexpected and delicious glimpses of the surreal - this poet's third country' (Maura Dooley). Her less autobiographical later books are concerned not only with divisions between East and West but also with the interplay between inner and outer worlds, imagination and reality, physical and spiritual.

"Split World" was published at the same time as Moniza Alvi's collection "Europa", and includes poems from five previous collections: "The Country at My Shoulder" (1993), "A Bowl of Warm Air" (1996), "Carrying My Wife" (2000), "Souls" (2002) and "How the Stone Found Its Voice" (2005).