Kulwant Singh Virk was born at Phullarwan in Sheikhupura district in 1921 and is generally considered the finest Punjabi short story writer of his generation.
His stories are short, unadorned and about ordinary rural people, and they refuse to explain themselves. Dhartee Hethla Bald, the bull beneath the earth, is the title of one of his stories.
His Partition stories, particularly Khabbal, are among the least sentimental treatments of 1947 in any language. He served in the army during the war and worked afterward as a public relations officer for the Punjab government.
He moved to Canada late in life and died there.
His stories have been translated into a number of Indian languages and are studied in Punjabi schools, which has flattened them into set texts.
He served in the army during the Second World War, worked as a journalist, and later ran the public relations department of Punjab. The prose has the plainness of a man who wrote to be understood the first time.
Khabbal takes its title from the grass that comes back in a field however often it is cleared, and the story uses it for what survives displacement. It is anthologised constantly and is short enough to read in ten minutes.
He won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1968 for Nave Lok. His work is in print in Punjabi and only patchily available in English.