Pakistan

Introduction

2019 marked the birth centenary of critic Mohammed Hassan Askari (1919–1978) and the 150^th death anniversary of the poet Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1769–1869). The latter had lived through several epidemics, including cholera and smallpox; his timeless verse in response, assumed new relevance at the outbreak of Covid-19. Meanwhile, 2019 saw new fiction by established writers such as Uzma Aslam Khan, Musharraf Ali Farooqi, Sabyn Javeri, HM Naqvi and Omar Shahid Hamid and debut novels by Aysha Baqir, Haroon Khalid Akhtar, Jamil Jan Kochai and Anniqua Rana. There were new poetry volumes by Anis Shivani and Harris Khalique; a topical play by Rukhsana Ahmad; significant life writing by Maniza Naqvi, Deepa Agarwal, Tahmina Aziz Ayub and Malala Yousufzai and important translations of Perveen Shakir, Mirza Athar Baig and Zafar Ullah Poshni. There were incisive critical studies by Claire Chambers, Peter Morey, Amina Yaqin, Alaya Forte, Mitali P. Wong and M. Yousuf Saeed. There was a rich offering of non-fiction too: on culture, history, medicine, politics and much else.

Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire received the Adab Festival-Getz Pharma Award and was shortlisted for the Liberaturpreis, the International Dublin Literary Award and the DSC Prize. It was due to receive the Nelly Sachs Preis in Germany, but this was withdrawn because Shamsie supports the pro-Palestine BDS movement. An international furor followed; hundreds of writers came out in Shamsie’s support. Mohsin Hamid’s critically acclaimed Exit West was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and the DSC Prize; Aamina Ahmad’s play The Dishonoured won the 2019 ScreenCraft Stage Play Competition; Shenila Khoja Moolji’s academic study Forging the Ideal Muslim World received the Jackie Kirk Outstanding Book Award and the Michael Harrington Award; Tariq Khosa’s The Faltering State: Pakistan’s Internal Security Landscape received the UBL Literary Award. Among others, Uzma Aslam Khan’s “Plum Island” won the Zoetrope All-Story Short Fiction Competition; Dur-e-Aziz Amna’s “Your Tongue Is Still Yours: Reflections on Language” won the Bodley Head/FT Essay Prize; Kekhashan Khalid’s “The Puppetmaster” won The Abdus Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction; Maham Javed’s “The Tallest Women” won the inaugural Zeenat Haroon Rashid Writing Prize for Women, where the last two also had Saadia Khatri’s story and essay as Special Mention, respectively.

In the wake of Covid-19, books honouring a disappearing past assumed particular significance, including Maniza Naqvi’s memoir, A Guest in the House, a rare tale of courage and determination, describing how she saved Karachi’s oldest bookshop, The Pioneer Book House, from being sold. To achieve this – a personal dream – she juggled private trips to Karachi with her Washington job. She tells of her enchantment with the bookshop, its historic, now-overcrowded location, its old families, elegant colonial architecture, ancient trees, the harbour beyond and the park where, legend says, Rama and Sita stayed. She befriends Zafar Sahib, the bookshop owner, and his heirs. She cleans and dusts the bookshop, re-organizes its bookshelves and rare historic books, introduces new works, draws students from nearby colleges, holds book launches, links up with the art and literary festivals and raises funds through supportive writers and activists and the sale of her memoir.

Will this newly-viable bookshop survive the pandemic’s fallout? How do people cope with future uncertainties? Nobel prize-winner Malala Yousufzai’s We Are Displaced: My Journey and Stories from Refugee Girls around the World tells of many struggles including her own. The Begum: A Portrait of Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s Pioneering First Lady by Deepa Agarwal (India) and Tahmina Ayub Aziz (Pakistan) is a unique biography drawing on rare resources in the co-authors’ respective countries. Agarwal recreates Begum Liaquat’s early years: she belonged to the Christian Pant family of Brahmin origin, received degrees from Lucknow University, became a Professor of Economics in Delhi, married Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan and converted to Islam. Aziz explores Begum’s Liaquat’s vision for Pakistan as Prime Minister’s wife, her legendary work as a humanitarian and women’s rights activist, the courage she showed at her husband’s assassination in 1951 and her continued work for women’s empowerment. She became Pakistan’s first woman Ambassador and Sindh’s first woman Governor too.

Novelist Sabyn Javeri’s story collection Hijabistan explores the word “hijab” as a symbol of modesty and suppression. Stories such as “The Date” tell of women who are publicly “hidden” but employ “invisibility” to great advantage. In “Under the Flyover” a newly-wed Karachi couple, desperate for privacy in their crowded family flat, meet secretly in secluded parks and streets. Stories set in Britain include “The Girl Who Is Split in Two” and “The Hijab and Her”, capturing how exclusions young British Muslims face, draw them to ISIS. “Only in London” celebrates cultural symbiosis: a young Pakistan-born woman, with her new British passport and dressed in western attire, heads out – to buy mangoes.

Gender, migration and change permeate Rukhsana Ahmad’s stage play Homing Birds, revolving around a British doctor, Saeed, adopted as an Afghan refugee child by Michael and Jenny Davies in London, but his surrogate mother Jenny dies. Michael and Saeed’s shared memories of her embody Afghanistan and Saeed’s vanished past. Saeed is haunted by images of Kabul: his loving mother and sister and his elder brother’s violent death. Saeed joins a Kabul hospital, after a dynamic Afghan woman politician, visiting London, urges him to help reconstruct his homeland. His experiences in a greatly altered, war-ravaged Kabul, amid the trauma and courage of its inhabitants, including a dedicated, female health worker, leads to a shocking revelation of his own past and gender inequality.

2019 saw several accomplished first novels. Jamil Jan Kochai, winner of a 2018 O’Henry Award, was born in Pakistan, brought up in America and belongs to a family from Logar, Afghanistan. His novel 99 Nights in Logar breaks new ground with a chapter – a family secret – written entirely in Pashto. Merging real and surreal, with echoes of 1001 Nights, he combines oral family tales with the adventures of Marwand, the Afghan American narrator, aged 12, on a visit to his family in Logar, which includes his secret expedition with cousins to find their runaway dog. Kochai welds in the resonances of war and conflict, but the mysterious illness, which overtakes the household, the uncertain cure, limited medical facilities and mandatory self-quarantine, becomes a microcosm of today’s pandemic.

Hidden illnesses and family secrets seep through Haroon Khalid Akhtar’s first novel Melody of a Tear which reconstructs the life of the suicidal 31-year-old Zara. Her father expects her to behave like a son, but trying to please him, she alienates friends, fails academically and never sheds tears. She becomes fascinated by Zaid a young man: she has seen a tear glisten on his cheek. The resonances of this and her discovery of Safaid Kothi, a derelict, once-fashionable house occupied by Zaid’s friend, Waris Ahmed, a prolific but obscure crime-writer and his poor, Hindu carers, leads to unusual friendships. The intricate plot spans urban and rural Pakistan, income disparities, childhood traumas, love, abuse and murder and an unexpected twist, querying imagination and the written word.

Anniqua Rana’s poetic Wild Boar in the Cane Fields vividly recreates rural Punjab. The narrator, Tara, is discovered by Saffiya Bibi, a landowner’s widowed daughter, and her maidservant, Amman Bhaggan, as an abandoned baby, covered with flies. Tara considers herself an almost-daughter to Saffiya, looks after her wardrobe, also works in the kitchen, shares a room with Amman and a charpoy with the Christian gardener’s child, with a disturbed mother. Amman’s three grown-up sons sleep on the verandah outside; each notices Tara developing into a young woman. The interaction between the characters and their dreams, including Amman’s aspirations for Sultan her school-going eldest, are built skillfully alongside devastating accidental deaths and fears of rampaging boars while the saint Pir Makhianwala’s protective flies assume a surreal role. Aysha Baqir’s incisive debut Beyond the Fields incorporates Zia-ul-Haq’s notorious 1979 Hudood Ordinance, which does not differentiate between rape and adultery. The novel is framed by Zara, the narrator, aged 16, travelling from her rural Bahawalpur home to Lahore, to find Tara, her disgraced twin. Zara recalls her village, her loving parents and the circumstances leading to Tara’s rape. The power of the landlord over small farmers, such as Tara’s father, the enlightened teacher who encourages Zara’s brother Omar to educate her at home, the sudden curtailment at puberty of Zara and Tara’s freedom to play in the fields are all built into this moving narrative. In the Company of Strangers by Awais Khan, an innate storyteller, a terrorist bombing in Lahore cripples a young boy. To pay his medical expenses, Ali the elder brother, becomes a fashion model. This takes him into the giddy patriarchal world of Pakistan’s super-rich where he falls in love with the beautiful, married and abused, Mona. Ali’s discovery that Mir, a charity worker who commands extremists, has terrifying implications. While Inside City by Anita Mir vividly recreates the changing fortunes of a traditional Lahore family living in the historic walled city across the twentieth century from the colonial era and Jallianwalla Bagh massacre to post-independence Pakistan.

Among established novelists, the award-winning crime writer, Omar Shahid Hamid’s compelling fourth novel The Fix focuses on match fixing in women’s cricket: the Pakistan team’s wins the Asia Cup and competes, in Britain, for the World Cup. The captain and vice-captain, Sanam and Fatima, now media stars, are approached by unscrupulous, match fixers. The huge sums involved and a corrupted player or team’s clever sleight of hand in “throwing” a match, is recreated with remarkable skill. The plot includes Sanam’s attraction to the legendary cricketer Faisal Qadir, her friendship with Fatima and their early struggles in patriarchal Pakistan to play cricket professionally. Sheheryar B. Shaikh’s imaginative second novel Call Me Al: The Hero’s Ha Ha Journey combines real, surreal and absurd through dialogues between an angel and two dead men at the gates of heaven and hell, to assess their past, present and future and that of their killer, Altamaash “Al”, a ruthless, corrupt Pakistani politician exiled in London, yet controlling followers in his homeland.

Uzma Aslam Khan’s remarkable, powerful fifth novel The Miraculous History of Nom Ali throws new insights into that notorious colonial penal colony, the Andaman Islands, and juxtaposes its occupation by the British and Japanese before and during World War II, respectively. Nomi, her brother Zee and their older, Burmese friend Aye are “Local Borns”, descendants of released prisoners, forced to settle there to ensure continuing manpower. Nomi’s father is an ex-convict. Her mother runs The Female Factory for women prisoners, where Nomi sees the “dangerous” prisoner 218D. Nomi, Zee and Aye have all studied at the local English school. Aye works for Mr. Howard, a senior colonial, accompanies him to jail and helps force-feed the disobedient including 218D. But Aye has discovered undelivered letters to her in Howard’s desk: her crime is her fierce anti-colonial activism. Aye’s silent communication with her and his friendship with local aborigines are pivotal to Nomi’s tale, as is the fate of Nomi’s brother, Zee, for offending the Japanese – with devastating consequences.

History, memory and change permeate H.M. Naqvi’s second novel, The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack, which sparkles with witty, lively recollections of bygone multi-cultural Karachi. The narrator, Abdullah, writer, historian and intellectual, celebrates Karachi’s minorities including his friend, the brilliant Goan jazz player, Jerry Pinto. Decades later, the septuagenarian, Abdullah shelters Jerry’s teenage grandson, Bosco, from threats by the land mafia: Bosco, Abdullah and Abdullah’s newly-found, mysterious love, Jugnu, become an almost-family. Abdullah’s narrative, welds the public and the personal, the absurd and the tragic, linking his life and times to that of his city; he shares the name of its patron saint Abdullah Shah Ghazi; his wealthy father was an Anglicized Khoja – as was Pakistan’s founder (Uncle Jinnah to Abdullah). His nickname, “Cossack”, inspired by a Russian vodka, dates back to pre-prohibition times in his youthful heyday and that of Karachi, in marked contrast to the disorder and indignities of today – and that of the elderly, overweight, unmarried Abdullah in a new puritanical, intolerant and avaricious Pakistan. Abdullah’s rich brothers wish to sell, for huge profits, the crumbling childhood home in the once-fashionable Garden East where Abdullah lives.

In The Merman and the Book of Power: A Qissa, Musharraf Ali Farooqi brings together the English fiction he writes and the Urdu classics he translates. He uses the literary form of a qissa (fable) to create stories within stories, merging history, myth and legend. In 1258, the Mongols capture Baghdad and defeat the Abbasids. Soon fishermen capture a frightening human beast-fish: a merman. Qaswini, the renowned scholar and cosmographer places him in an observatory and compares his studies of the creature with others described in his “Marvels of Things Created and Mysterious Aspects of Things”. Illustrated by Michelle Farooqi, this magical story employs the elusive Book of Power to reveal the merman’s tale of longing and desire. Anis Shivani also imagines many worlds in the enchanting A History of the Cat in Nine Chapters or Less narrated by Fu Shivani, a cat, recalling his nine lives, each in a different civilization from 10,000 BCE to 2020. Irshad Abdul Kadir’s informed and thought provoking second novel The Prodigal explores the half-English, Karachi-born Akbar’s quest for spiritual enlightenment. This takes him from France to studies in Islamic philosophy at a Karachi mosque, a northern mountain madrassah and then Cambridge University. Throughout, Akbar’s universalist engagement with a mystical, intellectual Islam challenges that of others opting for violent, politicized extremism.

Soniah Kamal’s Unmarriageable reconstructs Pride and Prejudice in a contemporary Pakistani setting, revolving around the Binat family in Dilipabad, a small fictitious town. Kamal uses caricature to great advantage, highlights the limited lives of women and their thwarted aspirations in a changing society. The younger Binat girls long for professions such as modelling or cricket. The eldest Binat sisters are both schoolteachers. Jena falls in love with the eligible rich “Bungles”, a sanitary towel manufacturer; Alysba learns that she and that difficult inscrutable aristocrat, Darsee, both love books. The Pakistani American Syed Afzal Haider’s well-crafted tale The Life of Ganesh revolves around an Indian couple from Jhansi: Ved, an academic, and Sita his wife, have settled in the United States but are trapped in an incompatible marriage. Their trip with their son Vijay to southern France brings up memories of lost loves and the possibilities of alternative relationships.

Among poetry debuts, the lives of women and the power of words, permeate Tameen Faridi’s unusual Invisible Treats & Poetic Delicacies for the Hungry Heart which employs food as a metaphor and consists of three sections each presented as a menu. Sahibzada Noor’s The Dragonfly and Other Poems covers diverse topics, though the quality of the work varies. The best includes a rich 17-part poem, “Mohalla Sangar”, which interweaves past and present, including family tales and historical anecdotes. The title poem links the whirring of a dragonfly’s wings with that of drones hovering over today’s Waziristan. Some poems combine the rich imagery of land and history. Others mourn personal and public tragedies, including Mishal Khan lynching for blasphemy in Peshawer and the US bombing of Syria. Journalist Anjum Altaf’s Transgressions: Poems Inspired by Faiz Ahmed Faiz consists of English poems, each inspired and illuminated by Faiz’s Urdu poems. Altaf’s original work is different from translations by well-known Faiz translators, printed alongside as reference. Altaf’s “Why?” describes the suffering homeless and engages with Faiz’s “Kuttey” (“Dogs”); “Go” links Faiz’s protest against tyranny, “Aaj Bazaar Mein Pa Ba Jaulan Chalo” (“Let’s Walk Fettered in the Street today”), to the recent public defiance against the extremist attack on celebrated a Sufi shrine. Often, Altaf engages with other literatures in poems such as “A Prison Morning”, inspired by Faiz’s “Zindaan Ki Aik Subha” (“A Prison Daybreak”), where Altaf draws on with Primo Levi’s experience of Auschwitz too.

The human rights activist and trilingual poet Harris Khalique’s fourth English collection, no fortunes to tell derives its title from his poem “The Palm Reader of Aleppo” about a Syrian massacre. Khalique employs words to great advantage in his spare, free verse. His sequence “The Six Emirs” inspired by Rainier Maria Rilke’s “The Tsars” captures the nature of tyranny and tyrants. Several poems protest against injustice, lawlessness and shocking incidents, including the 7-year-old Zainab Bibi’s rape, the 2014 terrorist bombing of Peshawer School and the incarceration of Assiya Bibi, a Christian, for blasphemy.

Anis Shivani’s accomplished new collection Logography: A Poetry Omnibus consists of three volumes, Confessions II, Lyric/Resistance and The Art of Love, each different in mood, style and form but united by Shivani’s clever interplay of words and imagery. Confessions II consists of 100 numbered poems of ten lines each, which challenge divisive creeds and encompass natural life, history, archeology and literature. In Lyric/Resistance the poems, neither named nor numbered, employ diverse poetic forms. Many refer to migration, the passage of time, life, death and fate. Some refer to his parents or his Muslim and South Asian background. The Art of Love is framed by numbered poems, each consisting of two lyrical couplets addressed to a lover, but between verse 35 and 36, this orderly sequence is disrupted by longer, fiercer, poems, with uneven structures and a sense of rebellion and angst.

The deceptively-titled Three Contemporary Artists by Iffat Sayeed is actually an edited multi-disciplinary book featuring the Urdu poetry of Yasmeen Hamid translated by Iffat Saeed, the English language poetry of Rizwan Akthar and illustrations by Heraa Khan. This book includes some truly fine work and the decision to portray an Urdu and an English-language poet together is very welcome.

A new and significant translation of Perveen Shakir’s poetry by Naima Rashid Defiance of the Rose covers several subjects, but many poems are strongly feminist. “When the Wolves Come” embodies patriarchy’s threat to the female narrator’s identity and self; “Tomato Ketchup” begins, “In our country, a woman who writes poetry//is considered something of an oddity”, and makes a witty comment on the mockery of male writers. Shakir provides matriarchal interpretations to the Prince Saiful Mulook legend and Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Several poems contemplate solitude; others celebrate nature; Shakir reflects on Karachi’s violence in “Oh My Bleeding Shackled City” while “A Poem for My Son” advocates, in an uncertain world, the finest human qualities.

In 2019, notable prose translations included Khadija Mastur’s novel A Promised Land translated by Daisy Rockwell, Ismat Chughtai’s One Drop of Blood: The Story of Karbala translated by Tahira Naqvi and Manto and Chughtai: Essential Stories edited and translated by Muhammed Umar Memon. Haider Shahbaz’s translation from Urdu of Mirza Athar Baig’s novel Hassan’s State of Affairs has received much praise for the linguistic skill which transmutes it from the Urdu to appear “traditionally embedded in English” (Sardar Hussain News International 12 Apr). The main protagonist Hasan Raza Zaheer, an accountant, observes the world through the windows of the office van. The people and places he passes daily assume a life of their own in his imagination. This panoply of characters includes a junk seller, a collector, a professor, his pupil and screen writers. The plot blends real and surreal – incorporating philosophy, culture, filmmaking, fairies and djinns, folklore, Hollywood – and spans Hassan’s life from childhood to old age.

Zafar Ullah Poshni’s extraordinary memoir Prison Interlude: The Last Eyewitness Account of the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case translated by him, aged 90, from the original Urdu, tells of his imprisonment as a young army Captain in the alleged 1951 plot, led by General Akbar Khan to overthrow the government. He and others co-accused were finally released under a 1955 “amnesty”. His narrative incorporates court appearances but provides a particularly vivid description of his years in Hyderabad Jail. There, for a while, his fellow prisoners included some of his co-accused, before they were confined elsewhere, such as General Akbar, his wife Naseem, the communist activist Sajjad Zaheer and poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. They pass the time by organizing gatherings in the compound for volleyball, poetry recitals, lectures on history and politics. Petty quarrels flare up too. He meets suffering prisoners of all ilks and sometimes hears screams of flogged inmates in nearby cells but never loses track of the news and records his comments in his diary.

The year saw several important critical works. Contesting Islamophobia: Anti-Muslim Prejudice in Media, Culture and Politics edited by Peter Morey, Amina Yaqin and Alaya Forte, a multi-disciplinary essay collection which includes a historical exploration of Islamophobia, the political events leading to its resurgence and its impact on Muslims, with its focus on cultural production. Nath Aldala’a and Geoffrey Nash’s discussion on Martin Amis’s short story “The Last Days of Mohammed Atta” includes theories of Us and Them by Amis and other “anti-Muslim intellectuals”. Roberta Garret excavates Eurocentric, Orientalist themes in George R.R. Martin’s fantasy novels which became the television series Game of Thrones. Amina Yaqin compares two very different novels by Muslim women writers, Elif Shafak’s 40 Rules of Love, Leila Aboulela’s Minaret and challenging western Islamphobia and portrayals of subjugated Muslim women embodied by the veil. Madeline Clements discusses two major, multi-dimensional Pakistani art exhibitions in Britain; Leila Tarakji analyzes Muslims in American cartoons, particularly G. Willow Wilson’s new Ms Marvel, the humane Kamala Khan, a Pakistani, an American and a Muslim woman. Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin’s interview of Nadia Latif explores Latif’s play Homegrown for schools about the radicalization of young Muslims.

Claire Chamber’s unusual monograph Making Sense of Contemporary British Novels interprets, through the expression of the senses, ten novels by British South Asian Muslims, grouped by decade. “Part I: 1990 ‘It was only through touch that we really knew things’” consists of a chapter each on the tactile experiences in the Egypt-born Ahdaf Souief’s Eye of the Sun and the British-born Hanif Kureishi’s Black Album, but Souief’s also tackles gender related issues such as beauty treatments and physical abuse. “Part II: Smelling and Tasting in the 2000s” explores faith, identity, migration and multi-culturalism through a sense of smell in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. Chambers explores tastes, culinary or otherwise, to interpret Laila Aboulela’a Minaret, Robin Yassin Kassab’s The Road to Damascus and Yasmin Crowther’s Saffron Kitchen. “Part III. Taking Soundings in the Technologized 2010” examines technology and digitalization, noise and violence and sound and its absence in Tabish Khair’s Just Another Jihadi Jane and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire; the chapter on Mohsin Hamid’s futuristic Exit West examines sensory perceptions and “a technology-assisted” digitalised future.

The Changing World of Contemporary South Asian Poetry in English: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by Mitali P. Wong and M. Yousuf Saeed is possibly the first full-length critical study of Anglophone poetry covering India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. The co-editors’ essays provide the overall socio-political and literary contexts. The Pakistan section spans 50 years through four significant articles: Ayesha Fatima Barque’s “Demons in the Poetry of Maki Kureishi”; Kaukab Roohi Rasool’s “Adrian A. Husain’s Search for Truth and Identity within Dialectics of Violence and Freedom: A Reading of His Pre-9/11 Poems”; Ilona Yusuf’s “ Fluidity in Words: Exploring Themes in the Poetry of Shadab Zeest Hashmi” and my own contribution, “Matriarchy and Language: Maki Kureishi, Imtiaz Dharker, Moniza Alvi and Hima Raza”.

In non-fiction, pioneering books on cultural production include Navid Shahzad’s acclaimed Aslan’s Roar: Turkish Television and The Rise of The Muslim Hero and Fatima Bhutto’s lively and much praised New Kings of the World: Dispatches from Bollywood, Dizi and K-Pop. The sumptuous and informative Pakistan’s Radioactive Decade: An Informal Cultural History of the 1970s edited by Niilofur Farrukh, Amin Guljee, Jon McCarry celebrates Pakistan cultural flowering in the 1970s, including colour photographs of the spectacular exhibition of Pakistan’s finest artists which preceded the book. The remainder consists of informed essays in different categories such as visual art, theatre, dance, architecture, advertising and fashion. The literature section covers diverse subjects, with Aquila Ismail’s “Of Breaking Free: Resistance Poetry of the Seventies”, Ilona Yusuf’s “Homage to the 70s: Energy in Poetry”; Mirza Abid Jaffer”s “Narrating the Nation: A Conversation with Muneeza Shamsie” and Jamal Abro’s “Mother’s Lap”.

The many other rich and rewarding non-fiction works include Azra Raza’s The Cell: And The Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last, Tariq Rahman’s Interpretations of Jihad in South Asia – An Intellectual History, Shuja Nawaz’s The Battle for Pakistan: The Bitter US Friendship and a Tough Neighbourhood, Fida Husain Malik’s Balochistan: A Conflict of Narratives and Ilhan Niaz’s The State During the British Raj.

Among Pakistan-based literary journals, Aleph 2019 showcased very fine photo essays; an “Archive” section on the late poet Daud Kamal, poetry or fiction by new and well-known writers, a wide range of essays including Umaima’s Miraj’s “The Black Man’s Rebellion” discussing Ralph Ellison and my article “Critical Studies on Pakistani English Literature 2011–2013: A Survey”. Interviewed authors included Sheela Reddy, Amit Chaudhuri, J.T. Leroy and Laura Albert. Unfortunately, another important journal Papercuts was discontinued; and two excellent, topical monthly magazines Herald and Newsline with a good reviews section, were closed down.

Overall, 2019 was particularly productive for Pakistani English fiction and non-fiction, with a strong diverse offering of translations too. Unfortunately, there were fewer noteworthy poetry collections than usual, a surprising paucity of short story collections, and published drama continued to be scarce.

There were many losses: Khalida Hussain (b. 1937), celebrated writer of Urdu fiction, particularly the short story; Jamil Jalibi (b. 1929), critic, translator, academic and editor; Himayat Ali Shair (b. 1926), lyricist and poet; Mehr Jiwan Khan (b. 1941), bureaucrat, novelist and essayist and journalists Anil Dutta (b.1944), Nusrat Nasarullah (c. 1947) and Zuhra Karim (b. 1932), founder and editor of She magazine. They are deeply mourned.