Afra Bukhari (14 March 1938 – 2 January 2022) was a Pakistani writer, best known for her short stories in the Urdu language.

Biography

Bukhari was born in 1938, in

Amritsar Amritsar, also known as Ambarsar, is the second-List of cities in Punjab, India by population, largest city in the India, Indian state of Punjab, India, Punjab, after Ludhiana. Located in the Majha region, it is a major cultural, transportatio ...

British Raj The British Raj ( ; from Hindustani language, Hindustani , 'reign', 'rule' or 'government') was the colonial rule of the British The Crown, Crown on the Indian subcontinent, * * lasting from 1858 to 1947. * * It is also called Crown rule ...

, and moved to

Lahore Lahore ( ; ; ) is the capital and largest city of the Administrative units of Pakistan, Pakistani province of Punjab, Pakistan, Punjab. It is the List of cities in Pakistan by population, second-largest city in Pakistan, after Karachi, and ...

Pakistan Pakistan, officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by population, fifth-most populous country, with a population of over 241.5 million, having the Islam by country# ...

after the

partition of India The partition of India in 1947 was the division of British India into two independent dominion states, the Dominion of India, Union of India and Dominion of Pakistan. The Union of India is today the Republic of India, and the Dominion of Paki ...

in 1947. She studied at the Government College in Lahore, and began writing short stories in

Urdu Urdu (; , , ) is an Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in South Asia. It is the Languages of Pakistan, national language and ''lingua franca'' of Pakistan. In India, it is an Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of Indi ...

for her children in 1959. In 1978, after the death of her husband, she stopped writing and devoted her time to her family, but resumed writing and publishing in the 1990s. During the course of her career, she wrote five collections of short stories: in 1964 she published ''Faasle'' (tr: Distances), and in 1998 she published ''Nijaat'' (tr: Salvation). In 2003, she published ''Ret Mein Paoon'' (tr: ''Feet in the Sand'') and in 2009, she published ''Aaank aur Andhera'' (tr: ''The Eye and the Darkness''). Her last collection of stories, ''Sang-e-Siyah'' (tr: ''Black Stone'') was published in 2021, shortly before her death. She also published stories in a number of Pakistani literary magazines, and her only novel, ''Pehchaan'' (tr: ''Identity'') was never completed. A partially-written memoir, ''Us Ki Zindagi'' (tr: ''Her Life'') was also left incomplete at the time of her death. Bukhari was a well-known writer who was acclaimed by her colleagues: when her work was published in the Hindi journal ''Hans'', the Hindi writer

Premchand Dhanpat Rai Srivastava (31 July 1880 – 8 October 1936), better known as Munshi Premchand based on his pen name Premchand (), was an Indian writer famous for his modern Hindustani language, Hindustani literature. Premchand was a pioneer ...

praised her writing, giving her the title of "rebellious short story writer," and critic and translator Asif Farrukhi compared her to Virginia Woolf. Her son, Amir Faraz, is also a writer, and her daughter Fatima Ali is a journalist. Bukhara died on 2 January 2022, at the age of 83.

References

1938 births 2022 deaths 21st-century Pakistani women writers 21st-century Pakistani writers Pakistani people of Indian descent People from Amritsar Urdu-language writers from Pakistan Indian emigrants to Pakistan {{Pakistan-writer-stub