Qurratulain Hyder

Qurratulain Hyder (20 January 1927 – 21 August 2007) was an Indian Urdu novelist and short story writer, academic, and journalist. One of the most outstanding and influential literary names in Urdu literature, she is best known for her magnum opus, Aag Ka Darya (River of Fire), a novel first published in Urdu in 1959, from Lahore, Pakistan, that stretches from the fourth century BC to post partition of India.

Popularly known as "Ainee Apa" among her friends and admirers, she was the daughter of writer and pioneer of Urdu short story writing Syed Sajjad Haider Yaldram (1880–1943). Her mother, Nazar Zahra, who wrote at first as Bint-i-Nazrul Baqar and later as Nazar Sajjad Hyder (1894–1967), was also a novelist and protegee of Muhammadi Begam and her husband Syed Mumtaz Ali, who published her first novel.

She received the 1967 Sahitya Akademi Award in Urdu for Patjhar Ki Awaz (short stories), 1989 Jnanpith Award for Akhire Shab Ke Humsafar, and the highest award of the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters, the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship in 1994. She also received the Padma Bhushan from the Government of India in 2005.

After finishing her education from Indraprastha College, Delhi and Lucknow University, she moved to Pakistan in 1947, then lived in England for some time before finally returning to India in 1960. She lived in Bombay for nearly twenty years before shifting to Noida near New Delhi, where she had been staying till her demise. She never married.

She migrated along with her family members to Pakistan in 1947 at the time of independence "in the wake of burning trains of corpses going into and out of both countries, as Muslims moved to Pakistan and Hindus to India.". In 1959, the release of her novel Aag ka Darya (River of Fire) met with controversy in Pakistan. Soon after publication, she decided to go back to India, where she had since lived. Kamil Ahsan in The Nation wrote: "River of Fire tells a completist and syncretistic version of 2,500 years of history in modern-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—beginning with the Nanda Dynasty on the brink of defeat by the founder of the Mauryan Empire (323 to 185 BCE), and ending in post-Partition despair.”

Awards and honours She received the Jnanpith Award in 1989 for her novel Aakhir-e-Shab ke Hamsafar (Travellers Unto the Night). She received the Sahitya Akademi Award, in 1967, Soviet Land Nehru Award, 1969, Ghalib Award, 1985. She won Sahitya Akademi Award for her collection of short stories Patjhar ki Awaz (The Sound of Falling Leaves) in 1967. The Urdu Academy in Delhi conferred upon her the Bahadur Shah Zafar Award in 2000. She was conferred Padma Shri by the Government of India in 1984, and in 2005 she was conferred the Padma Bhushan the third highest civilian honour awarded by the Government of India, for her contribution to Urdu Literature and education.

Death Qurratulain Hyder died in a Noida hospital, near New Delhi, India on 21 August 2007 after a protracted lung illness. She was buried in the Jamia Millia Islamia cemetery, New Delhi.

Her death has been condoled by the President and Prime Minister of India, and Chief Minister of her home state Uttar Pradesh.

Works In translation Sound of the Falling Leaves. Asia Publishing House, 1996. . A Season of Betrayals: A Short Story and Two Novellas. Oxford University Press, 2000. . River of Fire. Translated by Qurratulain Hyder. New Directions Pub., 2003. . Fireflies in the Mist. New Directions Publishing, 2010. The Exiles. tr. by Nadeem Aslam. Hesperus Press, 2010. .