Send us a textThis week I present the work of an outstanding Punjabi poet and fiction writer Amrita Pritam. She was born in 1919 in a village in Gujranwala district, now in Pakistan. She moved to Lahore to work for the All-India Radio and married a businessman named Pritam Singh. This is how she acquired her last name. The country’s partition was a traumatic event for millions of people who were uprooted. Amrita Pritam felt the pain of everyone and penned her most famous work, a poem titled ajj aakhaan waris shah nuun. She spent the rest of her life in New Delhi writing poetry, short stories, novels, autobiographies, and travelogues that number dozens. She spent the last forty years of her life with Imroze, her partner, who brought artistic flair to her book covers and pencil sketches in between the pages. She earned many awards including Sahitya Akademi, Padma Vibhushan, and Jnanpith. Amrita died in her sleep in October 2005 at age 86.

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