Urdu Stories and Novels by Umera Ahmed

Umera Ahmed is a great name of the Urdu popular fiction. Unlike many other writers, she made a choice to write popular fiction instead of the literature. Her motto is to reach as large an audience as possible. She knows that it is possible only through the popular fiction and not through the literature. Actually, in Pakistan the audience of the Urdu literature is very small in number. Therefore, it is not a surprise that a writer with such a large caliber chose the popular fiction over literature.
The Urdu stories and novels of Umera Ahmed are excellent in diction. This has made many people in her audience to wonder that may be her education is relevant to Urdu literature. However, it is not true. In fact, Umera Ahmed has done masters in the English literature.
She lives in Sialkot. She got her education from the Murray College, Sialkot. By profession, Umera Ahmed has also been a teacher along with being a writer. She is a teacher at Army Public School, Sialkot and she teaches English to O level students of grade 9 and 10.
How Umera Ahmed started writing in Urdu is a very interesting story. Umera Ahmed’s handwriting of Urdu was very poor. In her university, she thought of writing diary every day in Urdu to improve her handwriting. Gradually instead of writing diary of her own accounts, she started to write diaries of two imaginary people, Kashaf and Zaroon, who were class fellows with clashing ideas in a Masters class of International relations. Over the time of two years, Umera’s writing improved. Moreover, those two diaries of imaginary people became an interesting Urdu novel. Umera sent that novel for publishing and it was published very soon. Umera Ahmed recalls that since then none of her Urdu stories ever had to wait for publication.
There are some specific areas in which the stories of Umera Ahmed are very powerful. Umera Ahmed is an expert of writing on International affairs and bureaucracy. Her first novel was on international affairs. Then she wrote an excellent novel on the bureaucracy of Pakistan called Amer Bail. The Amer bail is a parasite plant and this is exactly what the bureaucracy of Pakistan is. Initially Umera also tried to write on the lives of the people belonging to Armed forces of Pakistan and their families. However, those stories had research mistakes and they were not very well received.
After the bureaucracy, current affairs, and international relations, Her interest tilted towards producing Urdu novels on religion. She does not preach about the religion in her novels. However, the factor of religious mindedness is very strong in her stories and novels. Some of her stories with very strong religious undertones are Meri Zaat Zara e Benishan, Man o Salwa and Peer e Kamil (s.a.w.)
These days Umera Ahmed is not writing stories and novels for the popular fiction digests. Her focus is to produce stories and scripts for the TV now. Therefore, in her quest to reach a large audience Umera Ahmed is now a script and storywriter for the television.