Kartar Singh Duggal was born at Dhamial in Rawalpindi district in 1917 and came across in 1947. He wrote in Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi and English and produced over a hundred books.
He ran All India Radio's stations for years and was director of the National Book Trust, so he shaped what got broadcast and published in Punjabi for a generation as well as writing it.
His short stories are the strongest part of the work, written in Pothohari-inflected Punjabi about the district he came from and could not return to.
He translated the Guru Granth Sahib Ji into English in full, and wrote extensively on the Sikh tradition for a general readership.
He was a member of the Rajya Sabha and won the Sahitya Akademi and Padma Bhushan.
His Rawalpindi is a place that exists only in his stories now, since the community he wrote about left it in a single year.
He wrote over a hundred books in Punjabi and translated and adapted much of his own work into English and Urdu himself.
He headed All India Radio, the National Book Trust and the Punjabi board of the Sahitya Akademi at different points, which made him the most institutionally placed Punjabi writer of his generation.
His stories are set in the Pothohar of his childhood, which is in Pakistan, and the body of work is one of the largest single records of that country's life before 1947.