Abdullah Hussain

Mohammed Khan

Lahore, Pakistan

1970–2010

Abdullah Hussain, born Muhammad Khan in Gujrat, Punjab (then British India), was a groundbreaking Urdu novelist and short story writer. After losing his mother at six months old, he was raised by his father, a customs inspector. He trained as a chemical engineer in both Pakistan and Canada but found his literary voice in his twenties following his father's death.

Hussain introduced himself to anglophone readers with The Weary Generations (1999), a translation of Udas Naslain. Published in London during the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence, the novel explores themes of colonialism, identity and the trauma of the partition of India, and is widely regarded as a modern classic. He followed this with Emigré Journeys (2000), an original English-language novel about Pakistani immigrants in 1960s Britain, revisiting themes from his earlier Urdu novella The Journey Back, later adapted into the film Brothers in Trouble (1995) by Udayan Prasad.

He found himself working at a cement factory in Daudkhel when he first began writing what he initially thought was a short love story that later evolved into his debut novel Udas Naslain (1963), widely regarded as a modern Urdu classic, which earned him Pakistan’s prestigious Adamjee Literary Award. A collection of his stories, Downfall by Degrees (originally Nasheb in Urdu, 1981), was translated and published in Canada in 1987, making him one of the first contemporary Urdu writers to gain international recognition. Later novels like Baagh (1982), focusing on Kashmir, Qaid (1989), Raat (1994) and Nadar Log (1996), which tackled the 1971 India–Pakistan war, reflected Hussain’s refusal to shy away from controversial political topics.

Hussain was known for his unapologetic use of regional slang and profanities, which he considered vital to the authenticity of his characters. Critics often viewed this as coarse, but Hussain believed that sanitizing language was a betrayal of realism. In both personality and prose, he was described as straightforward and unpretentious, with a strong aversion to awards and publishing fanfare. Hussain remained an outsider to established literary circles, often stating that he drew more inspiration from world literature in English than from his Urdu peers. He was critical of the literary establishment and, notably, once requested that his novel Nadar Log not be reviewed for six months post-publication, believing the judgement should come first from ordinary readers rather than critics.

Hussain moved to south London after the height of his literary success and spent nearly four decades there, where he managed an off-licence in Clapham, before eventually returning to Pakistan. He died in Lahore in 2015 after battling blood cancer for several years.