Nanak Singh was born Hans Raj at Chak Hamid in Jhelum district in 1897 and took the name Nanak Singh on becoming a Sikh. He wrote around fifty novels and is the founder of the Punjabi novel as a popular form.
He was in Jallianwala Bagh on 13 April 1919 and survived the firing, unconscious under bodies. He wrote a long poem about it, Khooni Vaisakhi, published in 1920 and banned by the government. Every copy was thought lost until one surfaced in the 1980s. It was republished and translated by his grandson in 2019, a hundred years after the massacre.
His novels, Chitta Lahu, Pavittar Papi, Adh Khirhia Phul, are social realism aimed at a mass readership, on caste, on debt, on the treatment of women, on the hypocrisy of the pious.
He wrote a Partition novel, Agg di Khed, based on what he saw in 1947.
He sold in numbers no Punjabi writer had before. He is the reason there was a reading public for Punjabi fiction at all.
He was in debt for much of his working life and wrote to deadlines set by his creditors, which is a common condition among Punjabi writers of that generation and is rarely mentioned in the accounts of them.
His prose is plain and fast and was written to be read aloud in a house where one person could read. That is the audience the Punjabi novel was built for and it is why his sales were what they were.
Pavittar Paapi and Chitta Lahu are the novels usually named. His grandson translated the Jallianwala poem into English in 2019.