Musharraf Ali Farooqi
Birth—1968
|
Musharraf Ali Farooqi is an author, novelist and translator. He was born in 1968 in Hyderabad, Pakistan, and now divides his time between Toronto and Karachi.
Farooqi received his early education in Hyderabad, at St. Bonaventure’s High School and the Model School and College in Hyderabad, Sindh, and proceeded to attend NED University of Engineering and Technology in Karachi for three years, not finishing his degree. After about a year of studying engineering, Musharraf had something else in mind. To put it in his own words, he happily dropped out of the engineering program and made his own way through experimenting with writing and translating; albeit he told a different story to his mother. His new novel, Between Clay and Dust, was published to critical acclaim by David Davidar’s Aleph Book Company in April 2012. It was shortlisted for The Man Asian Literary Prize 2012 and longlisted for the 2013 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. An illustrated novel, Rabbit Rap, with art by Michelle Farooqi came out from Viking/Penguin Books India in August 2012. Farooqi’s second novel The Story of a Widow (Knopf Canada/Picador India) was shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2011, and longlisted for the 2010 IMPAC-Dublin Literary Award. His most recent children’s fiction is the novel Tik-Tik, The Master of Time, Pakistan’s first English language novel for children. His other children’s fiction includes the picture book The Cobbler’s Holiday Or Why Ants Don’t Wear Shoes (2008, A Neal Porter Book, Roaring Brook Press) and the collection The Amazing Moustaches of Mocchhander the Iron Man and Other Stories (2011, Puffin India), shortlisted for the India ComicCon award in the Best Publication for Children category. He has translated some major Indo-Islamic works into English. His critically acclaimed translation of the 1871 version of Dastan-e Amir Hamza (Adventures of Amir Hamza) by Ghalib Lakhnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami was published in October 2007 by the Modern Library. An abridged version was published in February 2012. He published the first book of a projected 24-volume translation of the world’s first magical fantasy epic, Hoshruba, in 2009. A selection from his translation of contemporary Urdu poet Afzal Ahmed Syed’s poetry was published by the Wesleyan University Press Poetry Series in 2010. Farooqi is developing the Urdu Project, an online resource for the study of Urdu language and literature. Lexicography is a new area in which Farooqi has made contributions by editing and launching the first online Urdu Thesaurus website and mobile app (the iPhone app is under development). The Urdu Thesaurus app is a much needed resource. With just a click, one can access a string of synonyms for Urdu words.
|
The Story of a Widow (2009)