Prem Prakash was born at Nawan Shahr in 1932, his mother's village, into a family from Badinpur near Khanna, and is one of Punjabi's major short story writers, working in a psychological register unusual in the language.
His stories deal with sexual and emotional interiority in a literature that has generally preferred social realism, and they were controversial for it.
He edited the literary magazine Lakeer for decades from Jalandhar, publishing new writers, on the same terms as every other Punjabi literary magazine, which is at a loss.
He won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1992 for Kujh Anakiha Vi.
The Punjabi short story between the 1960s and the 1990s is the strongest thing in the modern literature, and it is almost entirely untranslated.
The Punjabi short story was made by Nanak Singh's generation as a social form and turned inward by the writers who came after 1960. He is on the far side of that turn. His subject is what a person will not say, and the story generally ends without the thing being said.
A Punjabi literary magazine has no advertising, no subscription base worth the name and no institutional grant, and it appears when the editor can pay the printer. Lakeer came out on that basis for decades and the writers it carried had nowhere else to go.
The generation of Punjabi short story writers running from Kulwant Singh Virk to Waryam Singh Sandhu produced work that stands comparison with anything in Indian fiction of the period and is unavailable in any other language.