Role
Chair
Title
Retd.: Deputy Director, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting (India)
Region
New Delhi, India
From a humble beginning as a child labourer in the Punjab village of Madhopur, to becoming Deputy Director of India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Madhopuri’s journey is one of hardship, courage, determination, and literary creativity.
He holds a postgraduate degree in Punjabi from Lyallpur Khalsa College, Jalandhar. To his literary credit are fourteen books of fiction and poetry, including significant editorial and translation works.
His prolific writings bring to light the sufferings of deprived and oppressed peoples, especially the Dalits, who live within a caste-ridden society. Madhopuri’s highly acclaimed ‘Changiya Rukh: Against the Night’ (2002) is a seminal autobiography translated into English, Hindi, Urdu, Russian and Polish. In English, it was published by Oxford University Press in 2010.
‘My Caste-My Shadow’ is a book of poetry and ‘Ghadri Baba Mangu Ram’ solidified the author’s standing as an influential writer. His novel ‘Mitti Bol Paye,’ a 2021 Dhahan Prize finalist, has been compared with the writings of Thomas Hardy, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Charles Dickens.
Madhopuri is a recipient of the Bhartiya Sahitya Akademi Translation Prize and the Lifetime Achievement Award from Punjabi Academy in New Delhi. For a decade he served as the Director of the Punjabi Bhawan, Punjabi Sahit Sabha (in New Delhi) as well as Editor of the quarterly, Samkali Sahit magazine.
