Qurratulain Hyder was an Indian novelist and short story writer who wrote in Urdu, and she also worked as an academic and journalist. She was best known for River of Fire, her Urdu novel Aag Ka Darya, first published in Lahore in 1959, which spans from the fourth century BC to India after partition. Fireflies in the Mist, another of her novels, follows Bengalis and Bengali communists through the political shifts of Bengal in the early 1940s. She received the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Jnanpith Award in 1989 and the Padma Bhushan in 2005.
