Intizar Husain

Husain was born in what is now Uttar Pradesh and migrated to Lahore at Partition in 1947, a departure he described less as a political act than as an exile from a whole civilization of shared Hindu-Muslim myth and memory he refused to disown. He worked as a journalist and literary critic in Pakistan for decades while writing fiction that drew as freely on Hindu and Buddhist legend as on Islamic tradition.

Basti (1979) follows a schoolteacher whose memories of his vanished pre-Partition hometown surface against the backdrop of Pakistan's 1971 war with India and the birth of Bangladesh, using nostalgia not as sentimentality but as a form of mourning for a plural culture he felt Partition had destroyed.

He became Pakistan's leading Urdu fiction writer, nominated for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013, three years before his death in Lahore in 2016.