Al Mahmud was born in 1936. His career as a man of letters began in the sixties, during which time he was recognized as one of the three greatest poets in his country along with Samsur Rahman and Sahid Kadari. Subsequently, his short stories won the votes of the public for their lyricism, their romanticism. This until the end of the seventies when Al Mahmud rallied to fundamentalist doctrines and wrote practically nothing more than chronicles on his spiritual conversion. For most of his readers, Al Mahmud as a writer only exists through the works written before this change. He was awarded the Bangla Academy Prize in 1968 for his poems and the Humayun Kabir Prize in 1974 in Calcutta.