A Life in Words, the first complete translation of Ismat Chughtai's celebrated memoir Kaghazi hai Pairahan, provides a delightful account of several crucial years of her life. Along side vivid descriptions of her childhood years are the conflicted experiences of growing up in a large Muslim family during the early decades of the twentieth century. Chughtai is searingly honest about her fight to get an education and the struggle to find her own voice as a writer. The result is a compellingly readable memoir by one of the most significant Urdu writers of all time.

Ismat Chughtai (1915-1991) was born in Badayun and is counted among the earliest and foremost women Urdu writers. She focused on women’s issues with a directness and intensity unparalleled in Indian literature among writers of her generation. She is the author of several collections of short stories, novellas and novels—including, besides Terhi Lakir (The Crooked Line), Ajeeb Aadmi (A Very Strange Man) and Masooma —a collection of reminiscences and essays and a memoir, Kaghazi Hai Perahan (The Paper-thin Garment). With her husband, Shahid Latif, a film director, she produced and co-directed six Hindustani films and produced a further six, independently, after his death. Tahira Naqvi (translator), a translator of Urdu fiction and prose, taught English for twenty years, has taught Urdu at Columbia and now heads the Urdu programme at New York University. She has translated Ismat Chughtai’s short stories, novels and novellas and essays. She has also translated the works of Khadija Mastur, Sa’dat Hasan Manto and Munshi Premchand. Naqvi also writes fiction in English. She has published two collections of short fiction, Attar of Roses and Other Stories of Pakistan and Dying in a Strange Country. Her short stories have been widely anthologized

Translator : M. Asaduddin is an author, critic and translator. His work has been recognized with the Sahitya Akademi Prize and the Katha and A. K. Ramanujan awards for translation. Among the books he has published are The Penguin Book of Classic Urdu Stories, Lifting the Veil: Selected Writings of Ismat Chughtai, For Freedoms Sake: Manto, Joseph Conrad: Between Culture and Colonialism and (with Mushirul Hasan) Image and Representation: Stories of Muslim Lives in India. He is currently Professor, Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia.