Fire Area

By Iliyas Ahmad Gaddi
Translated into English by Jai Ratan

Set against the backdrop of coalfields in Bihar, Fire Area delineates the lives of the labourers and the exploitation of the backward classes at the hands of the rich and the bureaucrats. It encompasses a murky world of moral conflicts inhabited by people of varying lives and character, engaged in the monumental struggle for survival, where both realism and idealism coincide and clash. One of the finest novels to emerge from the modern Urdu literature, Fire Area received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1996.

About the Author
Novelist and short story writer, Iliyas Ahmad Gaddi is one of the pioneers of new writing in Urdu. He made his literary debut in 1948 with his short story ‘Afkaar’. He has published two collections of short stories and is popularly known for his Sahitya Akademi Award-winning novel Fire Area which had enriched fiction with its rootedness in the soil of Bihar, its effective exploitation of the local idiom and the powerful plea for social justice and humanism.