The Women's Courtyard

It is a novel that deserves much greater notice than it has received so far. It is a good thing that Daisy Rockwell, a knowledgeable and committed translator of Urdu and Hindi, has chosen to bring this truly great novel… to the wider world through her English translation. – Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, acclaimed author of ‘The Mirror of Beauty’

Khadija Mastur was an award-winning Pakistani short story writer and novelist who was highly regarded in Urdu literature. Her novel Aangan (The Women’s Courtyard) is widely considered a literary masterpiece in Urdu literature and has also been made into a television drama. Mastur was born in 1927 in Bareilly, India. She migrated to Lahore with her family after the independence of Pakistan in 1947 and settled there. Mastur wrote with conviction on patriarchy, classism, chauvinism, and misogyny. She saw them as “systemic poisons that destroy and kill women intellectually, emotionally and physically.”

Daisy Rockwell (translator) is an artist, writer, and Hindi-Urdu translator. She has translated numerous classic literary works from Hindi and Urdu into English, including Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas and Khadija Mastur’s The Women’s Courtyard. Her translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand was the winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize and the 2022 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. In 2020, she was the winner of the MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Translation of a Literary Work for Krishna Sobti’s A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There. In 2023 she was awarded the Vani Foundation Distinguished Translator Award.

Kamila Shamsie (foreword) is the author of eight novels, which have been translated into over thirty languages. Her novels include Home Fire (2018), which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Burnt Shadows, which won the Premio Boccaccio in Italy, and A God in Every Stone, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Award. Four of her novels have also won awards from the Pakistan Academy of Letters. A vice president and fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she was one of Granta’s “Best of Young British Novelists” in 2013. She grew up in Karachi, has an MFA from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and now lives in London.