Mohan Bhandari was born at Banbhaura in Sangrur district in 1937 and wrote short stories about the Malwa.
Moon Di Akh won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1998. His stories are about caste, land, and the violence that sits under ordinary village arrangements.
He wrote through the militancy years about the effect on ordinary people rather than on the parties to it.
He returned the Sahitya Akademi award in 2015 with the other Punjabi writers.
His work is in the tradition of Kulwant Singh Virk and Gurdial Singh: the Malwa village told without a narrator explaining it to an outsider.
His best-known story, Main Hun Theek Thak Han, is a single voice insisting that it is fine while the account it gives says otherwise, which is the standard Punjabi position on the militancy years and had not been written that way before.
He worked as a teacher and wrote in the evenings, which is the ordinary condition of Punjabi literature: almost nobody in it has ever made a living from it.
The Malwa short story tradition that runs Virk, Gurdial Singh, Ankhi, Bhandari and Waryam Singh Sandhu is the strongest body of prose in modern Punjabi and almost none of it exists in English.