Bapsi Sidhwa

Bapsi Sidhwa (born 1938) is a Pakistani novelist who is widely regarded as Pakistan's most internationally recognized English-language author. Born in Karachi into the Parsi Zoroastrian community and raised in Lahore, she was diagnosed with polio at age two and spent much of her childhood in relative isolation — a circumstance she credits with deepening her observational instincts. Her most celebrated novel, *Ice-Candy-Man* (1988; published in the US as *Cracking India*), narrates the 1947 Partition of India through the eyes of a young Parsi girl in Lahore, bearing witness to the violence that accompanied the creation of Pakistan and India. The novel was adapted into the 1998 film *1947: Earth* by Deepa Mehta. Her other novels include *The Crow Eaters* (1978), a comic family saga, and *An American Brat* (1993), about a young Pakistani woman's culture shock in the United States. She taught at Columbia, Mount Holyoke, and other universities. Bapsi Sidhwa lived b. 1938.