Saadat Hasan Manto

Manto worked as a journalist and screenwriter in Bombay's film industry through the 1930s and early 1940s, translating Russian and French fiction on the side, before Partition in 1947 sent him, reluctantly, and to his lasting grief, to Lahore in the newly formed Pakistan, severing him from the city he considered home.

He wrote obsessively about Partition's violence and its brothels, refusing to soften either, and was tried for obscenity six times across British India and Pakistan, including for the story 'Thanda Gosht.' Toba Tek Singh, his best-known story, sets its account of the border's insanity inside an asylum whose inmates are to be sorted by religion between the two new countries.

Poverty and alcoholism defined his last years in Lahore; he died there in 1955 at forty-two, cirrhosis of the liver ending a body of work Pakistan and India both later claimed as their own.