Zulfikar Ghose

Zulfikar Ghose (born March 13, 1935) is a novelist, poet and essayist. A native of Pakistan and current resident of Texas, his works are primarily magical realism, blending fantasy and harsh realism.

Born in Sialkot, India (now Pakistan), Ghose grew up as a Muslim. His father, Khwaja Mohammed Ghose, was a businessman. In 1942, during the Second World War, the family moved to Bombay (now Mumbai). After the partition of British India into Pakistan and India, Ghose and his family emigrated to England. He graduated from Keele University in 1959, going on to teach at Ealing Mead School in London.

He became a close friend of Anthony Smith, and of British experimental writer B. S. Johnson, with whom he collaborated on several projects. The three writers met when they served as joint editors of an annual anthology of student poets called Universities' Poetry. Ghose also met English poet Ted Hughes and his wife, the American poet and novelist Sylvia Plath, and American author Janet Burroway, with whom he occasionally collaborated.

While teaching and writing in London from 1963 to 1969, Ghose also freelanced as a sports journalist, reporting on cricket for The Observer newspaper. Two collections of his poetry were published, The Loss of India (1964) and Jets From Orange (1967), as were an autobiography called Confessions of a Native-Alien (1965) and his first two novels, The Contradictions (1966) and The Murder of Aziz Khan (1969).

In 1964, Ghose married Helena de la Fontaine, an artist from Brazil (a country he later used as the setting for six of his novels). He moved from London to the United States in 1969 to teach at the University of Texas in Austin, where he has lived since.

In the 1970s, Ghose gained international repute with his trilogy The Incredible Brazilian, which American writer Thomas Berger called "a picaresque prose epic of Brazilian history." American travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux called the work "a considerable feat of imagination."

Ghose has written both poetic and prosaic, fictional and non-fictional works. His books of poetry include The Violent West, A Memory of Asia and Selected Poems. He has written short stories, novels and five books of literary criticism.

Ghose's correspondence with Berger, spanning 40 years, is housed for research at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The letters cover topics such as their writing projects, books they were reading and personal concerns.

Berger's dystopic 1973 novel Regiment of Women was dedicated to Ghose.

• Zulfikar Ghose - UHV/ABR Reading Series, a talk at the University of Houston's Alcorn Auditorium in April 2009, hosted by the American Book Review.
• Society for Critical Exchange interview on YouTube, at the University of Houston in May 2009.