Ahmed Ali

(1910 - 1994)

A novelist, translator, and diplomat, Ahmed Ali was born in Delhi in 1910 and moved to Pakistan after the partition of India. In 1940 he published his first novel in English, Twilight in Delhi, about the waning of the Muslim aristocracy in India under British rule, to international acclaim. “My book was launched absolutely on its own merits,” he later said in an interview. Not on the merit of E.M. Forster or Joe Ackerley or John Lehmann or Virginia Woolf! Oh, no! I am happy, I am glad, that I was not introduced by anyone to the world.” He also served as a diplomat, a professor of English in China, and the founder of the All-India Progressive Writers Association.