Humayun

Humayun Ahmed (13 November 1948–19 July 2012) was a Bangladeshi author, dramatist, screenwriter, playwright and filmmaker. He was the most famous and popular author-dramatist-filmmaker in fifty-one years of Bangladesh’s history, including the ten years following his death.

He wrote over 250 books, almost all of them bestsellers. He enjoyed, and continues to enjoy, a cult following in his country. His fiction ranges over a variety of themes: from the liberation war that led to independence for Bangladesh from Pakistan, to its earlier colonisation by the British; from the dilemmas of individuals, when faced, especially, with love and death, to the unique trajectories of eccentric and comical characters trying to live their lives on their own terms; from a hugely popular series of novels featuring a professor of psychology confronted with seemingly paranormal events, to a detective who works on intuition rather than reason. As a very modern writer, Ahmed brings together an otherworldliness and supernatural element to his genre-bending fiction.

After his death, The Times of India wrote that “Humayun Ahmed was a custodian of the Bangladeshi literary culture whose contribution single-handedly shifted the capital of Bengali literature from Kolkata to Dhaka without any war or revolution.” Sunil Gangopadhyay, the popular Bengali writer from West Bengal, described him as the most popular writer in the Bengali language for a century.