Zulfikar Ghose

Zulfikar Ghose (1935–2022) was a Pakistani-born poet, novelist and essayist. Born in Sialkot and raised in Bombay, he emigrated with his family to England after Partition, graduated from Keele University in 1959, and taught in London before moving in 1969 to the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught English literature and creative writing until his retirement as professor emeritus in 2007. ¹ His books include the autobiography Confessions of a Native-Alien (1965), The Murder of Aziz Khan (1967), The Incredible Brazilian trilogy (1972–1978) and The Triple Mirror of the Self (1992). ¹

Ghose was born in Sialkot, Punjab, in British India on 13 March 1935, the son of the businessman Khwaja Mohammed Ghose; Wikidata gives his birth name as Khwaja Zulfikar Ahmed. ^{1 2} In 1942 the family moved to Bombay, and after the Partition of India they emigrated to England. ¹ He graduated from Keele University in 1959 and taught at Ealing Mead School in London, working also as a freelance sports journalist reporting on cricket and hockey for The Observer between 1963 and 1969. ¹ In 1964 he married Helena de la Fontaine, a Brazilian artist; Brazil later became the setting of six of his novels. ¹ In 1969 he moved to the United States to teach at the University of Texas at Austin, where he remained until his retirement as professor emeritus in 2007; he became a United States citizen in 2004. ¹ Britannica and the English article describe him as having grown up a Muslim in Sialkot and Bombay; no source names an adult affiliation for him, and the museum records none. ¹ Ghose died in Austin, Texas, on 30 June 2022, aged 87. ^{1 2}

His first books were the poetry collections The Loss of India (1964) and Jets from Orange (1967), the autobiography Confessions of a Native-Alien (1965), and the novels The Contradictions (1966) and The Murder of Aziz Khan (1967), in which a small farmer tries to save his traditional land from greedy developers. ¹ In the 1970s he gained international repute with The Incredible Brazilian trilogy — The Native (1972), The Beautiful Empire (1975) and A Different World (1978) — a picaresque sequence whose protagonist passes through several reincarnations across Brazilian history. ¹ His later fiction includes Crump's Terms (1975), A New History of Torments (1982), Don Bueno (1983), Figures of Enchantment (1986) and The Triple Mirror of the Self (1992), alongside five books of literary criticism, among them Shakespeare's Mortal Knowledge (1993). ¹ In 1963 he received a special award from the E. C. Gregory Trust, judged by T. S. Eliot, Henry Moore, Herbert Read and Bonamy Dobrée, and in 1989 The Review of Contemporary Fiction devoted an issue to Milan Kundera and Ghose together. ¹ His papers and his forty-year correspondence with the novelist Thomas Berger are held by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. ¹

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