Pakistan

Introduction

The year 2018 was very productive for English language writing by Pakistanis, with a diverse offering of fiction by established writers such as Fatima Bhutto, Mohammed Hanif, Aamer Hussein, Sarvat Hasin and Bina Shah and notable debuts by Sadia Abbas and Zarrar Said, among others. There were powerful poetry collections by Imtiaz Dharker and Moniza Alvi and acclaimed first collections by Zafar Kunial and Faisal Mohyuddin; significant translations into English of Shah Abdul Latif and Khadija Mastur and an acclaimed drama by Iman Qureshi. Critical studies included important works by Siobhan Lambert Hurley, Peter Morey, Amina Yaqin, Aroosa Kanwal and Saiyma Aslam. Non-fiction remains particularly strong with biographies by Sanam Maher and Francis Robinson, the autobiographies of Zubeida Mustafa, Ziauddin Yusufzai, Bishop John Alexander Malik; illustrated historical books by F. S. Aijazuddin, Omar Khan and Zulfikar Kalhoro and a wide range of works from culture and politics to economics by Razi Rumi, Anam Zakaria, Nasim Zehra, Aparna Pande and others.

Among national honours, the publisher Ameena Saiyid, novelists Mohsin Hamid and Mohammed Hanif received the Sitara-e-Pakistan; poet and essayist Harris Khalique was awarded the Pride of Performance award. In the Karachi Literature Festival prizes, Omar Shahid Hamid’s The Spinner’s Tale received the KLF Getz Pharma fiction prize and the KLF Italy Reads Pakistan Award; Rasul Bakhsh Rais’s Imagining Pakistan won the KLF German Peace Prize and the KLF Pepsi Prize for non-fiction. Samira Shackle’s forthcoming non-fiction book Karachi Vice won the inaugural Portobello prize. Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin’s science fiction anthology The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories was shortlisted for the Locus prize. Mohsin Hamid’s novel Exit West won the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Aspen Words Literary Prize and was shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Eastern Eye Arts Culture & Theatre Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, Rathbones Folio Prize; Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Hellenic Prize and was shortlisted for the Medici Book Club Award; Mariam Pirbhai’s Outside People won the Gold IPPY for Multicultural Fiction; Uzma Aslam Khan’s story “My Mother Is a Lunar Crater” was shortlisted for the 2018 Margarita Donnelly Prize; Iman Qureshi’s play The Funeral Director received the 2018 Papatango New Writing Prize; Sanam Maher’s biography The Sensational Life and Death of Qandeel Baloch was shortlisted for the Shakti Bhatt award. Zaffar Kunial’s first full-length poetry volume Us was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot award.

In Us Zaffar Kunial, the British-born son of Pakistani-Kashmiri father and an English mother often negotiates identity: “Ys” plays with imagery, words, sounds and identifies with Hanif Kureishi’s discussion on “Englishness”; “Hill Speak” contemplates the mother tongue of Kunial’s father, Pahari/Potwari; “I” engages with the Urdu poetry of exile, loss and displacement by the last Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, after whom the poet is named. Several moving poems such as “Prayer” and “Poppy” revolve around Kunial’s mother who died from cancer; Kunial recreates her Midlands family and the post office her father owned in several poems including “Stamping Ground (Earlier)” and “Stamping Ground (Later)”. The Pakistani American Faisal Mohyuddin’s first full-length collection The Displaced Children of Displaced Children looks at migration, partition and Islamophobia and “contains a multitude of forms descended from poetry’s long lineage” (Henry-Grey, New City Lit).

The year’s promising poetry debuts include Saad Ali’s Ephemereal Echoes, Bilal Hamid’s Moonrise and the Pakistani Canadian Jaffar Khan’s What Was I Thinking: Collection 1995-2018. Khan’s evocative poems capture Bahawalpur to which his family belongs and the many countries in which he has lived and worked as a company executive. “Havana Bay” and “Calgary” create metaphors from the imagery of landscapes; “A rural evening” captures the koels, crows and wheat fields of Cholistan; “Frida Kahlo” contemplates the artist’s life. Several poems such as “Skies” celebrate nature; others including “Drones over Hindu Kush”, “A Lahore Playground” and “Sectarian Times” comment on politics, violence and terror in Pakistan.

Imtiaz Dharker’s seventh poetry volume, the sophisticated Luck Is the Hook, considers the role of chance and fate on history, mythology, language and the individual. “Chaudhuri Sheikh Mubarik looks at the Loch” creates her Pakistani father’s sense of belonging as a migrant to Scotland, because he can say “Loch” as would “a true born Scot” and can make “the right sound at the back of his throat” — a sound intrinsic to Urdu, his mother tongue. Some poems capture rural South Asian life, such as “A Haunting”, a tale of unrequited passion. Several play with the image of the pomegranate as a metaphor for exile and migration, including “Six Pomegranate Seeds”, an intertextual engagement with the Persephone legend, and “Warning”, which considers Adam and Eve. Throughout, Dharker employs nuance and innuendo to advantage, creating spectacular images whether she writes of adolescence and adulthood, historical incidents or monuments, war and peace. The final poem, the spectacular “The Tide of Humber” has an innate musicality, blending the rhythms of the Humber estuary with a movement evocative of the timeless migrations of mankind and their discovery of new worlds.

Moniza Alvi, daughter of a Pakistani father and English mother, celebrates memories of her late father in her tenth collection Blackbird, Bye Bye which employs bird life as a metaphor for her family life. Alvi skilfully merges suggestion and ambiguity, the real and the surreal, and the mythological symbolism of the blackbird as a spirit, a link between heaven and earth. “Motherbird” captures the sorrow and suffering of the surviving elderly partner while “The Coldest Winter”, describing Fatherbird’s migration to England and “A Photo of Fatherbird” portraying him looking down from above after his death, are written in a horizontal V-shape, suggesting a bird wing or a flock of birds. The moving 16-part sequence “Afterlife of Fatherbird” is part-conversation between Alvi and her father, alternating between the first, second and third persons. Other poems also refer to the surreal paintings of Remedios Varo and the French poems of Jules Supervielle and Saint-Jean Perse. Her contemplation of memory, life and death leads up to “Less Much Less” an engagement with the popular song “Bye Bye Blackbird”.

In 2018, the only published play appears to be Iman Qureshi’s award winning The Funeral Director, which “tackles, with grace and dignity, the tricky subject of Islamic attitudes to same-sex relationships [and] makes a humane point without lapsing into preachiness” (Michael Billington, Guardian 4 November 2018).

Fiction remains central to the Pakistani English canon and notable first story collections include Tehmina Khan’s Things She Could Never Have (2107), Sana Munir’s Unfettered Wings, Mariam Pirbhai’s Outside People and Maheen Usmani’s The Mercurial Mr Bhutto. Aamer Hussein’s oeuvre includes many story collections and his new book Hermitage includes new and previously published work. Music as an expression of human emotions permeates the title story: here, in contrast to the disciplined chants of others in a monastery, the loud singing of a nun and monk betray forbidden emotions. While “Lady of the Lotus”, tells of a privileged Karachi housewife’s love for classical South Asian music in the 1950s and her longing for creative self-expression. Hussein often uses literary texts, eastern and western to suggest multi-layered nuances and innuendos. “The Man Who Stood Still” and “The Name” reconstruct the Laila and Majnu legend; “The Wounded Swan”, translated by Shahbano Alvi from Hussein’s Urdu original, recreates an Urdu legend to tell of Maya, an immigrant of Central European origin in London. Hussein also includes his English renditions of fables by Rumi and Attar; and creative memoirs which tell of the Urdu writers Rafi Ajmeri and Qurratulain Hyder among others.

In 2018, promising first novels included Taha Kehar’s Typically Taniya, Nadya Akbar’s Goodbye Freddie Mercury, Sarin Baigs’s Saints and Charlatans and Qazi Fasih’s The Song in the Night. Sadia Abbas’s moving debut The Empty Room, set in the 1960s and 1970s, captures the lives of “ashraf” (respectable) migrants in Karachi from the erstwhile United Provinces in undivided India. Tahira, a talented artist has an arranged marriage to Shehzad, a young man with a promising career and of the same class and provincial background. But Tahira comes from a loving financially secure home with a strong intellectual tradition while Shehzad’s family has endured financial hardships. His mother has been maltreated by his father, a gambler. She controls and dominates her household through her son and daughters and belittles Tahira. Shehzad duly presents Tahira with Maulana Ashraf Thanvi’s book, Heavenly Ornaments, instructing young women on the duties of a good, pious, obedient self-abnegating wife. Shehzad considers Tahira’s left-wing brother Waseem, “godless”. The egalitarian ethos and political struggle of Waseem and his socialist friends are quietly built in across changing political realities. Tahira’s suffering and the circumstances which lead to her rediscovery of herself as an artist become a foil to the options exercised by her friend, the unmarried, foreign-university-educated Andaleeb. Class, faith, belonging and exile inform Zarrar Said’s riveting, magic realist novel Pureland, set in a fictitious land with echoes of Pakistan. Salim Agha, the world-renowned mathematician, is assassinated by the mysterious narrator, Scimitar. His confession, permeated with a rich panoply of characters, including soothsayers, angels, witches and crows, reconstructs Salim’s life and times. A clever and brilliant boy, Salim, son of a poor Punjab farmer, catches the attention of General Zafar Khan, the powerful landowner. He sends Salim to an exclusive boarding school in Lorr city and magnanimously passes him off as a relative, but in the General’s home, Salim inhabits servant quarters. The revelation that Salim is an Ahmedi is built in gradually, as is Pureland’s disparagement of religious minorities: Ahmedis, Christians, Untouchables. At school, the discovery of Salim’s faith leads to ostracization. Furthermore, in the General’s feudal class-riven world, Salim’s growing independence and successful application for a scholarship to Columbia University is considered outrageous. Salim earns great international renown in America, but his longing for his homeland is complicated by his forbidden love for a beautiful woman there and by Pureland’s growing political instability and religious extremism. In Pureland, his genius is regarded with contempt.

Irshad Abdul Kadir’s second work of fiction and his first novel Deriabad Chronicles captures changing times in a princely state in Pakistan after Independence, including the engagement of the royal family in national politics. Sarvat Hasin’s second novel You Can’t Go Home Again captures the lives, loves and intricate relationships of a group of six friends at an elite co-educational Karachi school. In their senior year, during rehearsals for Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, one of them, Rehan, disappears. He is found a week later on his doorstep, with welts on his neck. He has no idea why, how, or where he has been. This incident uncovers suppressed memories and complex oft-unexpressed emotions that overtake Rehan and his friends Naila, Karim, Shireen, Maliha and Sabah in later life. Hasin’s skill lies in her ability to construct a sequence of six compelling interconnected tales thereafter, each focusing on a different protagonist. Maliha’s dysfunctional family life and her interest in the supernatural are used to great advantage to suggest the presence of djinns and spirits, complicating the compulsions which overtake the characters. Bina Shah’s fifth novel, the imaginative and vivid Before She Sleeps is the first full-length work of feminist dystopian fiction in Pakistani English literature and poses important questions on freedom, gender, subversion and the power of technology. Nuclear blasts have destroyed the subcontinent’s known world and a futuristic, high-tech verdant Green City, the capital of “South West Asia” has been developed in the desert. A lethal virus infecting only women has reduced their number drastically; their only role is to continuously bear children to more than one husband, chosen by the bureaucracy. Sabine the narrator escapes such a fate by finding her way to Panah, a hidden, underground shelter for women. Panah’s history and the friendships, tensions and rivalries in this all-women world are often reconstructed through extracts of diaries or letters. These women can only emerge undetected into The Green City at night; Panah sends them to visit secret Clients, men who need their company and emotional comfort as sex is against the rules. But patriarchy, sex and desire infiltrate these relationships, with or without a woman’s consent — as Sabine discovers to her cost, with terrifying and unexpected consequences.

Mohammed Hanif’s innovative third novel Red Birds set in a nameless, Muslim-majority nation revolves around a Camp, where a mysterious, abandoned Hangar was once the hub of American activity. But the Americans have left and Major Ellie, an American airforce pilot, is sent to bomb The Camp, a place at “the end of the world, hideout of some of the worst human scum”. Instead Ellie’s plane crashes in the nearby desert. He is found by Mutt, a poodle and captured by Momo a wily 15-year-old Muslim who lives in The Camp and thinks he is a spy. Ellie finds himself in a dilapidated “downgraded” refugee camp, an erstwhile city, with dying kitchen gardens, hardware and meat shops and blue plastic sheets serving as roofs. Hanif employs a sharp incisive humour to make a critical comment on American imperial power and modern warfare as defined by gadget and soundbites technologies. Momo’s family is haunted by the disappearance of his older brother Ali and Mother Dear is lost in sorrow. Father Dear, who once worked for the American in Logistics and Supplies in the now deserted Hangar, has imposed an American houseguest, Flowerbody, on his family. Flowerbody is researching post-traumatic stress disorder and “the Muslim mind” and is the official Coordinating Officer of a rehabilitation programme. Hanif’s assertion of faith and the elision of nationality among The Camp’s inhabitants makes a comment on American notions of Muslims as a monolith, that Alien Other, defined by stereotype. He criticises a superpower’s bombing of a people, reducing them to penury and then magnanimously providing them with aid. At the same time Hanif provides frequent glimpses of the interaction between the Americans and the local inhabitants; their misconceptions of each other are also offset by responses which reveal that people are people regardless of race and creed. The use of several narrators, including Ellie, Momo and Mutt, enhances the sense of the surreal which in turn queries divisions between the real and unreal. The many different perceptions that Hanif brings to the text represent a quest for the truth, embodied by the symbolic image of red birds: they are created each time blood is spilt and act as a reminder to people of what they would prefer to forget.

Conflict in the Middle East and ISIS recruitment of the young informs Fatima Bhutto’s second novel The Runaways. She explores how troubled young people are drawn to the message of “purity, equality and brotherhood” propagated by religious extremism, and develop into killers for, or advocates of, The Great Cause. Her narrative alternates between three protagonists who travel to training camps in Iraq: Sunny, a British Asian and a Muslim who has endured racial discrimination and is stifled by his father’s ambitions for him; Anita Rose, a poor Pakistani Christian girl longing to escape inherent prejudices of class and faith in Karachi and her ambitious brother’s exploitation of her and Monty, the spoilt rich, well-travelled Karachi boy obsessed by the inexplicable disappearance of Layla, the mysterious new girl with whom he had fallen in love at his elite school. Through them, Bhutto makes an incisive comment on the modern obsession with celebrity and how social media can propagate ideas, including the reinvention of the self.

The possibilities of social media as an escape from humdrum life runs through Shandana Minhas’ Rafina, which was first a film, Good Morning Karachi (2014). Rafina, the attractive, orphaned daughter of a policeman, longs to rise above gender bias, which limits her educational and career opportunities. Her menial job in a beauty parlour draws her by chance into the coveted, glamorous world of models, modelling and social media and reveals its power structures, power politics and the behind-the-scenes exploitation and indignities suffered by the less-fortunate.

The power of the Internet permeates Sanam Maher’s remarkable biography, The Sensational Life and Death of Qandeel Baloch, which tells of a fearless young woman, Fauzia Azeem, born in a village near Multan, who walked out on a bad marriage and reinvented herself as Qandeel Baloch. She became Pakistan’s leading social media star, known for her bold explicit videos. At 24, her brother murdered her in an “honour killing”, to the horror of the loving parents she had supported financially. Maher recreates Qandeel’s life by interviewing those who knew her, but gives further context with chapters on women activists, exploited women models, university students and, famously, a woman journalist’s photograph of a good-looking tea vendor. Dubbed “hot chai”, the photograph was circulated on social media and turned the young man into a celebrity.

In life writing 2018 saw Francis Robinson’s informative biography Jamal Mian: The Life of Maulana Jamal Abdul What of Farangi Mahal 1919–2012, which includes his Lucknow family’s spiritual traditions and his role in the Pakistan Movement. The autobiography of Dr. John Alexander Malik’s My Pakistan: The Story of a Pakistani Bishop provides rare insights into Pakistan’s Christian community. Ziauddin Yusafzai’s memoir Let Her Fly: A Father’s Journey and the Fight for Equality interweaves references to Yousafzai’s famous daughter Malala into the story of his own life: his early years in Swat, Swat’s traditional patriarchal customs, his growing awareness of gender inequality and his determination, as a school teacher, to educate girls, including Malala. The horrific Taliban rule, the attempt on Malala’s life, her recovery in Britain and his pride in her Nobel prize, her wisdom and her intelligence create a riveting narrative remarkable for its quietness and control. The pioneering and award-winning journalist, Zubeida Mustafa, joined Dawn in 1975 and became the first woman assistant editor of a national daily. Her fascinating autobiography My DAWN Years: Exploring Social Issues, spanning thirty years, includes the growing induction of women into mainstream journalism, the changing mores of censorship and technology and her role in the development of the newspaper’s magazine supplements, including “One World Supplement”, “The Women’s Page” and “Books and Authors”. Pervin Ali’s memoir A Free Spirit tells of an unusual life in which a privileged Lahore education and upbringing co-existed with her great love of freedom, sport and music. She played the guitar, enjoyed squash, paragliding, fast cars and travel. Her marriage to Syed Babar Ali, her cousin, took place in Washington DC, where his brother Syed Amjad Ali was the Pakistan Ambassador; their guests included President Richard Nixon. She writes of other luminaries she has met too, but devotes considerable space to family life, including poet Henna Babar Ali, her daughter.

2018 saw important critical studies. Siobhan Lambert-Hurley’s Elusive Lives: Gender, Autobiography and the Self in Muslim South Asia looks at autobiographical writings by South Asian Muslim women in many different subcontinental languages since the late 19^th century. These texts reveal the social, political and religious aspects of women’s lives and range from the Begums of Bhopal, Atiya Fyzee and Jahanara Shahnawaz to Princess Abida Sultaan, Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah, Jahanara Habibullah and Khurshid Mirza.

The Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing edited by Aroosa Kanwal and Saiyma Aslam is the first major comprehensive collection of critical articles on Pakistani English literature. These include Cara Cilano’s exploration of non-Muslim Pakistani identities since 1947 and essays by me and Daniela Vitolo on depictions of 1971. The extensive discussions on 9/11 include essays on related fiction by Ulka Anjaria and Ambreen Hai while Suhaan Mehta focuses on diaspora Pakistani drama. The book addresses the representation of human rights and provides considerable space to gender issues, the latter including Aqeela Abdullah’s analysis of British Pakistani women playwrights dealing with “sexuality, marriage and gender violence”. The book leads up to an extensive discussion on future dimensions of Pakistani English literature and includes Asma Mansour’s exploration of both poetry and fiction while Waseem Anwar’s engagement with contemporary poetry and that of Rafat and Ahmed Ali in the early, post-Partition years re-examines definitions of a “Pakistani idiom” and the term “Pakistani author”.

Peter Morey’s Islamophobia and the Novel looks at the representation of Muslims in World Anglophone fiction today. He incorporates the role of history, economics and contemporary politics in the west’s notions of “the Muslim Problem” today. He discusses the novels of Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and John Updike portraying Muslims as irrational, violent and totalitarian. He explores Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and Hanif Kureishi’s work, particularly The Buddha of Suburbia and Black Album, in which economics and upward mobility are treated as a form of multiculturalism, distancing the main protagonists from the Muslim community. Morey argues that the “Muslim misery memoirs” of Azhar Nafisi and Khaled Hosaini reinforce western stereotypes. While Amy Waldman’s The Submission and H. M. Naqvi’s Home Boy, set in New York, engage with racism and Islamophobia, attempting to create a multicultural space for Muslims. He discusses the post-9/11 thrillers of John Le Carré and Don Fesperman as expressing an Islamophobia that crosses borders as does “the war on terror”. In marked contrast, global novels such as Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows and Nadeem Aslam’s Wasted Vigil assert the interconnectedness of nations and challenge stereotypes; Mohsin Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist tries to represent the Muslim view in an ambiguous text, challenging the pre-supposed ideas of both western and Pakistani readers and Leila Aboulela’s Minaret becomes a Muslim woman’s rediscovery of her faith. A related text, Muslims, Trust and Multiculturalism: New Directions, edited by Amina Yaqin, Peter Morey and Asma Soliman, employs interdisciplinary dialogue to explore migration, minorities, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in the west, with particular reference to Britain; it also looks at literary works, including Ali Eteraz’s Children of Dust, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette.

Journalist Raza Rumi’s essay collection Being Pakistani: Society, Culture and the Arts challenges the “reductive” concept of Pakistan as a country defined by geopolitics, war and violence and explores instead how its rich cultural production has shaped identity and society. He writes on art, architecture and music; examines the mystical poetry of Kabir, Bulleh Shah and Lalon Shah and discusses the significance of the river Indus in legends and folklore and how these are reclaimed through dialogue (e.g. the Indo-Pakistan’s dialogue on conservation) in contemporary times. He looks at the representation of women in the poetry of Bulleh Shah, the fiction of Manto and the bold feminism of Fahmida Riaz. He writes on the novels of Quratulain Hyder’s novels across the Indo-Pakistan divide, the dissident and influential politics of Habib Jalib, Ahmed Faraz and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the unique voice of Intizar Husain and the little discussed oeuvre of Mustafa Zaidi. Sadly, he reduces Pakistani English Literature to a few novels related to geopolitics.

In 2018, the many notable books of non-fiction include illustrated historical books: Omar’s Khan Postcards from the Raj, F. S. Aijazuddin Sketches from a Howdah: Charlotte, Lady Canning’s Tours 1858–1861 and Zulfikar Kalhoro’s Symbols in Stones: Rock Art of Sindh. The invaluable Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Pakistan edited by Aparna Pande provides a wide, informative analyses by well-known scholars on many different aspects of Pakistan, including literature, history, politics, economics, religion and international relations. Journalist Nasim Zehra’s From Kargil to the Coup: Events That Shook Pakistan is an acclaimed and courageous investigation into a little discussed episode in Pakistan: the 1999 military adventure into Kargil which almost led to a nuclear war. Anam Zakaria’s vivid account Beyond the Great Divide: A Journey into Pakistan-administered Kashmir is divided into three parts “The Beginnings: When Kishananaga became Neelum”, “Fight to Finish” and “Beyond the Ceasefire”. Zakaria provides rare insights into the Into-Pakistan conflict in Kashmir by drawing on oral history to tell of the lives, struggles and aspirations of people living on the densely populated Pakistan-side of the Line of Control, including refugees, teenagers, wives, mothers, militants, nationalists and officials.

2018 saw several translations, including Day and Dastan: Two Novellas, translated by Nishat Zaidi and Alok Bhalla; The Women’s Courtyard by Khadija Mastur, translated by Daisy Rockwell; Neglected Christian Children of the Indus by Mairaj Azam, translated by Michelle Azam and Risalo by Shah Abdul Latif, translated by Christopher Shackle. The sumptuous annual Aleph Review includes translations, poetry, fiction and life writing as well as graphic fiction, bilingual poetry, collaborative poetry and interviews. Both Aleph and the bi-annual Papercuts are Pakistan-based literary journals of some excellence and it was good to see that after an absence of five years, the important, US-based Pakistaniaat is back online but as a free access annual.

From all this it can be surmised that Pakistani English literature continues to expand its horizons with remarkable new works of prose and poetry, though there is a glaring paucity of published dramas. It was good to see a growing number of critical studies, the high quality of critical and creative work in literary journals and the continuing interest in book reviews, interviews and related article in Pakistan’s English language dailies, particularly Dawn’s Books and Authors.

The year saw many losses: academic and critic Saba Mahmood (b. 1968); journalists Anis Mirza (b. 1928), Anjum Niaz (b. 1948), Annie Khan (b. 1980); the Urdu novelist Mazhar Karim renowned for his “Imran” thrillers; Muneer Ahmed Qureshi (b. 1933), best known as the acclaimed Urdu poet Munnu Bhai; Fahmida Riaz (b. 1946), celebrated for her bold, pioneering feminist Urdu poetry and essays, although she also wrote English prose and timeless books for children; the academic and poet Professor Yusuf Hassan (b. 1948); bureaucrat and renowned satirist and Mushtaq Ahmed Yusuf (b. 1923) and M.U. Memon (b. 1939), an important, pioneering and prolific translator and an editor of The Annual of English Studies. They are deeply mourned.