Siddique Alam Follow

Siddique Alam was born in Purulia, West Bengal, in 1952 and is currently based in Kolkata. He began writing fiction in 1972, and has since emerged as one of the foremost voices of modern Urdu prose, with five collections of short stories, five novels and a collection of poems, as well as several other stories published across key literary magazines across India and Pakistan. Alam's work is marked by a rigorous attention to historical detail, which he combines with a fantastical and magic realist approach, marking a new trend in Urdu fiction. His work has been translated into Hindi, and several of his short stories have appeared in English translations in Words Without Borders, River of Flesh and Other Stories (Speaking Tiger Books, 2016) and Contemporary Urdu Short Stories from Kolkata (Niyogi Press, 2023). A collected translation of his short stories, The Kettledrum and Other Stories by Musharraf Ali Farooqi won the prestigious Armory Square Prize, and was published in December 2024 by Open Letter Books.

Jaideep Pandey is a research scholar in Comparative Literature. He works on idioms of literary modernities, desire, and gender across Urdu, Persian, Arabic and Hindi. His translations have appeared in The Journal of Urdu Studies, Rusted Radishes, Indian Literature, and in two volumes published by Routledge and Oxford University Press. His translation of Sameena Nazir's 'Kallo' won the 2024 Mozhi Prize for Translations from Indian Languages.