Saadat Hassan Manto was born in 1912 in the Punjab, British India. After the Partition in 1947, he migrated to Pakistan where he died in 1955. During his short life he produced twenty-two collections of short stories, one novel, five series of radio plays, three collections of essays, and two collections of personal sketches. He always wrote in Urdu but some of his most famous works have been translated into English. He is now considered to be one of the best short story writers from South Asia, and in 2015 a biographical drama film Manto was released celebrating his life and work.

Like D.H. Lawrence, to whom he has frequently been compared, Manto was a popular but also controversial character because of what he wrote about and the explicit nature of his language. His stories, usually satirical in tone and minimalist in style, were published at a time when both India and Pakistan were very conservative. They explore the taboo aspects of relationships such as sex and violence, and also depict the socio-political features of a culture that constrained and harmed both men and women. These were published in his series Letters to Uncle Sam and Nehru. Many of his writings were banned by both Indian and Pakistani governments for being unpalatable, but he continued to write in his own style about the darker aspects of life…