About the Book Gurdial Singh: A Reader is a 'one-stop shop' that showcases the life, times and works of one of the most significant living. novelists in Punjabi today. A prominent trendsetter in Punjabi fiction, Gurdial Singh has put the dispossessed and the marginalized at the centre of his fictionscape. He belongs to that rare breed of Indian writers who continue to show critical engagement with contemporary social reality, and invariably portray this reality with a touch of authenticity. ideological commitment and passionate intensity. His writing betrays a definite penchant for critical realism, and carries an imprint, not necessarily the burden, of the classical tradition of writing. Along with a fair sampling of Gurdial Singh's fiction, both long and short, this Reader includes his non-fictional, autobiographical and journalistic writings, too. Here Gurdial Singh speaks in his own voice in several of his works and, of course, in a series of personal interviews. Others (especially, scholars and critics of Punjabi literature) also speak about him and his work in an easy-to-understand, engaging style that strikes an instant chord in the heart of a lay reader. This Reader provides a critical context and framework within which the texts of Gurdial Singh could easily be located and read. An engaging account of the man and the influences that shaped his genius over the years, Gurdial Singh: A Reader is an insightful compendium, and, of course the first-ever attempt of this kind - to bring the raw flavour and primal passion of his writing into English, mainly for the benefit of non-Punjabi readers, both in India and abroad.
About the Author RANA NAYAR is Professor, Department of English & Cultural Studies, Panjab University. Chandigarh. His main areas of interest are: World Drama/Theatre, Translation Studies, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies. A practising translator of repute (Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow & Sahitya Akademi Prize Winner), he has rendered around ten modern classics of Punjabi into English. He also has one collection of poems Breathing Spaces (Unistar, Chandigarh) and two critical books, i.e., Edward Albee: Towards a Typology of Relationships (Prestige, New Delhi, 2003) and Inter-sections: Essays on Indian Literatures, Translations and Popular Consciousness (Hyderabad: Orient Black Swan, 2012) to his credit. A committed theatre lover, he has directed over twenty major, full-length productions, and has acted in almost as many.
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