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Ajeet Cour, a foremost Punjabi writer of contemporary India, has published twelve volumes of stories, five novels, two volumes of autobiography, a collection of biographical pen-sketches, a travelogue, and several creative transcreations of fiction and poetry. Her autobiography Khanabadosh, in which she portrayed her struggles with a gender-discriminating society as also with her own self, got Sahitya Akademi Award for the year 1986. Ajeet Cour is also the initiator of a literary movement which seeks to decipher and establish SAARC literature as a sub-stream with a distinctive South Asian Identity. To achieve this objective, she established the Academy of Fine Arts and Literature in 1975 to highlight the region’s art, culture and literature, and also to take up issues like peace, cooperation, women’s empowerment, social discrimination against Dalits, poverty, injustice, violation of human rights, etc. later, she established the Foundation of SAARC Writers and Literature (FOSWAL) as a separate wing of the Academy dealing exclusively with SAARC literature. Under the banner of FOSWAL, she has been taking the lead in organizing SAARC Writer’s Conferences, seminars, exchange programmes and other modes of literary interaction for crystallizing the movement. She has also been disseminating the literature of the region by publishing books, anthologies, journals, etc. and also running a state-of-the-art website with a massive input in terms of the region’s representative writings.

Pankaj Bhan teaches English language and literature in a Delhi University college. As a British Council scholar, he did short-term courses on English Language Teaching at Chester and Liverpool in 1990 and 1992 respectively. He has ‘transcreated’ many literary text from Hindi into English, including Babu Devaki Nandan Khatri’s classic Chandrakanta. His critical work entitled ‘Ruth Jhabvala’s India: The Image of India in the Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’ will soon be out. He has been working in the field of human rights too and has been participating in the meetings of UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva.