'A book to be treasured' - Banu Mushtaq
'Keenly observed and unflinching' - Annie Zaidi
'[A] masterpiece' - Musharraf Ali Farooqi
First published in 1955, Wandered the Traveller is a lost classic of South Asian literature - now available in English for the first time in Daisy Rockwell's revelatory translation.
Nisar Aziz Butt's semi-autobiographical novel follows Afgar, a brilliant young Pashtun woman, from a turbulent orphaned childhood, through the cloistered world of a mountain sanatorium, to the brink of departure in pursuit of a doctorate at Cambridge. Fiercely intelligent yet yearning for love, Afgar measures each man she meets against the standards of her own restless mind, and finds them wanting.
Witty, tender, devastating, Wandered the Traveller offers a quietly radical portrait of female ambition and desire from a part of the world nearly absent from the literary canon.
About the Author
Nisar Aziz Butt was born in 1927 in Mardan, near Peshawar, in the region of the Indian subcontinent then known as the North-West Frontier Provinces (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan). The top student in high school mathematics in her region, she moved to Lahore to continue her studies at Punjab University but had to leave for a few years when she contracted tuberculosis and was moved to the Dadar Sanatorium. Later, she returned to complete her MA and went on to teach maths at the university. She began writing her first novel, Nagari Nagari Phira Musafir (Wandered the Traveller), in college, and published it in 1955. She subsequently wrote three more major novels, Nae Chiraghe Nae Gule (No Lamp, No Flower, 1973), Karvaan-e-Vujud (Procession of Existence, 1983), and Darya ke Sang (The River's Stones, 1990), as well as a memoir, Gae Dinon ka Suragh (In Search of Bygone Days, 2004). She was a contemporary and friend of numerous well-known Urdu authors, such as Qurratulain Hyder, Khadija Mastur and Altaf Fatima, and wrote a popular column about the Urdu literary world in the
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