Sant Singh Sekhon was born in a Lyallpur canal colony chak in 1908, taught English literature, and became the leading Marxist critic of Punjabi literature.
He wrote plays, novels, short stories and criticism, and his A History of Punjabi Literature is a standard reference. He translated Shakespeare into Punjabi.
His criticism placed Punjabi literature in a social and economic frame and it set the terms for Punjabi literary argument for forty years, including for the people who disagreed with him.
He wrote the play Kalakar and the novel Lahu Mitti, and he wrote a substantial body of work about the Sikh tradition from a secular and materialist position, which few others attempted.
He won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1972.
He wrote in Punjabi at a time when the educated preference in East Punjab was to write in English or Urdu, and part of his significance is simply that he chose the language and stayed with it for fifty years.
His history of Punjabi literature in English, written with Kartar Singh Duggal, remains the standard single reference of its kind and is hard to find. It covers the tradition from the Naths onward and its judgements have shaped what is taught.
He taught at Punjabi University Patiala and at Punjab Agricultural University and a generation of Punjabi critics trained under him. The Marxist frame he used has fallen out of fashion and nothing of comparable range has replaced it.