Ajeet Cour was born at Lahore in 1934 and came to Delhi in 1947. She writes in Punjabi and is among the most significant women prose writers in the language.
Her autobiography Khanabadosh won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1986. It is direct about her marriage, her divorce, her work and the death of her younger daughter in a road accident, in a register Punjabi autobiography had not used.
She founded the Academy of Fine Arts and Literature at Delhi and has run the Foundation of SAARC Writers and Literature, bringing writers from across South Asia together at a time when their governments were not speaking.
Her daughter Arpana Caur is one of India's better known painters and has worked extensively on 1947 and 1984 as subjects.
Her fiction is about women in circumstances they did not choose and the specific economic vulnerability of a woman alone in a Punjabi family structure.
She trained as an economist and worked in that line before she wrote full time, and it shows in the fiction's attention to what a woman actually has: what she earns, what stands in her name, what she can sell, and what becomes of her when none of it does.
The South Asian writers' meetings ran for years, bringing Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Nepali and Afghan writers to Delhi and Indian writers out to them. For long stretches they were close to the only regular literary contact between India and Pakistan that did not depend on a visa policy going well that month.
She has been publishing for more than sixty years and has stayed in Punjabi the whole way, in a Delhi where the pull toward English or Hindi has been constant and where nearly everybody in her position took it.