LAHORE- The brilliant Urdu language scholar, translator, poet, short-story writer and the editor of The Annual of Urdu Studies, Muhammad Umar Memon passed away on Monday.
He was a retired professor of Urdu Literature and Arabic Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He taught Urdu, Islamic Studies, Arabic and Persian at the university. He retired after serving the Institute for 38 years. After his retirement, he continued working as a scholar.
Memon was born in Aligarh, India in 1939 – the youngest of his parents’ six children. “It was a pretty lonely childhood and quite uneventful,” he said in one interview.
The late author completed his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at Karachi. He taught at Sachal Sarmast College and Sindh University. He went to the US in 1964 on a Fulbright scholarship and did his Master’s at Harvard University. He did his Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from UCLA.
In 1989, he published a collection of short stories, Tareek Galee. Apart from writing stories, Memon had translated the work of Urdu giants such as Intizar Husain and Naiyer Masud into English.
Rest in Peace Mr. Memon!
