Amrita Pritam

Amrita Pritam was a Punjabi-language poet, novelist, and essayist regarded as the first major woman writer in modern Punjabi literature. Born in Gujranwala in 1919 in what is now Pakistan, she was raised by her father after her mother's death when she was eleven and began publishing poetry as a teenager.

Her early collections appeared under her married name before she separated from her husband in 1960. The 1947 partition of India shaped much of her writing, most directly in the poem Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu, an address to the eighteenth-century Sufi poet Waris Shah lamenting the violence of partition. The poem is recited on both sides of the Punjabi border.

Her novel Pinjar, published in 1950, follows a Hindu woman abducted by a Muslim man during the partition years and was adapted into a 2003 Hindi film of the same name. Other notable works include Sunehade, the autobiography Rasidi Ticket, and the long poem Kagaz Te Canvas.

Pritam edited the Punjabi literary monthly Nagmani with poet Imroz, her companion of more than four decades, from 1966 until 2002. She received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1956, the Jnanpith Award in 1981 for Kagaz Te Canvas, and the Padma Vibhushan in 2004. She also served a term in the Rajya Sabha as a nominated member. She died in New Delhi in 2005.

The name Amrita is a Sanskrit given name meaning immortal or nectar of immortality. She carried it through a body of Punjabi poetry and prose engaged with partition and women's lives.