Zulfikar Ghose Biography

Pakistani-American novelist and poet, born in Sialkot (now Pakistan); he lived in England from 1952 to 1969, and later became a professor at the University of Texas. He is the author of several volumes of poetry, including The Loss of India (1964), The Violent West (1972), and A Memory of Asia (1984); his Selected Poems were published in Pakistan in 1991. His first novel, The Contradictions (1966), was followed by The Murder of Aziz Khan (1969). Both works are set in the Indian subcontinent, but several others, including The Beautiful Empire (1975), A Different World (1978), A New History of Torment (1982), and Figures of Enchantment (1986) have a Latin American background; they have been described as ‘picaresque prose epics of Brazilian history’ and ‘tales of the South American unknown’. In his novel The Triple Mirror of the Self (1992) Ghose juxtaposes his imaginative recreations of ‘primitive’ Latin America with pictures of recent Peruvian history and accounts of a boyhood in colonial India and a student's life in 1950s Britain. Whereas the segments that are set in the rainforest are mainly concerned with erotic fantasies, the Peruvian section is a convincing analysis of nationalism and expatriation. The Triple Mirror is a conflation of all Ghose's previous preoccupations and concerns, an exile's lyrical reclamation of lost sources, and a manifesto of the artist as dreamer and philosopher.