In Pursuit of Peace and Justice: The Quiet Resistance of Jeelani Bano (1936-2026)
Jeelani Bano is one of the most significant – but relatively unrecognized – Urdu fiction writers of the 20th century. The talk is the first public tribute to Bano in Pakistan on the occasion of her 90th birthday on July 14 and since she passed away earlier this year in Hyderabad on March 1. It will focus on her remarkable career as a fiction writer, along with dramatic readings of her selected work.
Opening remarks by Dr. Humera Ashfaq.
About the Speaker:
The speaker, Raza Naeem is an award-winning Pakistani writer, researcher and translator, trained in Political Economy at the University of Leeds in UK and in Middle Eastern history from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, USA. He is the recipient of a prestigious 2013-2014 Charles Wallace Trust Fellowship in the UK for his translation and interpretive work on Saadat Hasan Manto, and most recently a runner-up/finalist for the inaugural 2017 Jawad Memorial Prize for Urdu-English Translation (India), awarded for his translation of ‘Bahaar’ (Spring), a short story written by Abdullah Hussein. He has also written the foreword to the reissued edition of Abdullah Hussein’s classic partition novel ‘The Weary Generations’ (HarperCollins India, 2016). His work has been widely anthologized both nationally and internationally, as well as being translated into other regional languages like Urdu, Tamil, Bengali and most recently, Gurmukhi (Punjabi); and has also been selected/showcased for presentation at important international literary festivals like the Winnipeg International Writers Festival (Canada) and the Lucknow and Delhi Literature Festivals (India). He was recently selected as an emerging translator from Pakistan for attending the pioneering fully-funded weeklong South Asian Literature in Translation (SALT) Summer School in Colombo in August 2024, among just 41 fellow translators selected from around the world. He is currently translating Pakistani Urdu writer and critic Mumtaz Shirin’s short-stories and unfinished autobiography. He is based in Lahore as the President of the Progressive Writers Association (Anjuman Taraqqi Pasand Mussanifeen).
This session is free and open to all. Just visit the venue to attend it.
The Black Hole
Plot 5H, Street 100, G-11/3, Islamabad.
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