Gurbachan Singh Bhullar was born at Pitho in Bathinda district in 1937 and has written short stories, essays and criticism for six decades.
He edited Punjabi periodicals and worked in Delhi, and his stories are about the Malwa village and about the displacement of moving from it into a city.
He won the Sahitya Akademi award in 2005 for Agni Kalas.
He returned the award in 2015 in the writers' protest over the killing of writers and rationalists in India, one of a group of Punjabi writers who did so.
His essays on the state of Punjabi publishing, readership and language policy are among the more clear-eyed assessments available and are not comfortable reading.
He worked at the National Book Trust and in Punjabi publishing in Delhi for most of his career, which gave him a view of the language's institutional position that few writers inside Punjab had.
His essays argue that Punjabi's problem is not hostility from outside but indifference from Punjabis, and specifically from the educated Punjabi middle class that reads English and puts its children into English schools. That argument is unpopular and is difficult to refute.
He is one of the writers who returned a state award in 2015. Several Punjabi writers did, and the Punjabi group was among the largest from any single language.