This was supposed to be a continuation of my previous column on Naqlain Aur Hikayatain [Anecdotes, Tales and Parables] edited by Prof Abdur Rasheed, but I was unable to locate an important reference, and decided to turn the conversation in the interim to a subject on which I am often consulted by young writers, and which would also be of interest to many readers of this section: publishing a work of fiction.

Many years ago, in 1992, I was looking for a publisher for a collection of fairytales I had written and published in a children’s magazine where I worked as an editor. I prepared the manuscript and mailed it to 10 publishers in the US. Only Penguin responded with a form letter, advising me that, if I wished to be considered by a publisher, I should submit through a literary agent, and that I could find them in a book titled Literary Market Place. I found this very fat book (now, thankfully, a website) in the American Centre Library, and learned about literary agents and their areas of speciality in different genres of fiction and non-fiction.

Around the same time, I started having doubts about the fairytales. One was about a man who rolled down from a hilltop daily and, one day as he rolled down during a snowfall, he gathered snow and became a giant snowball and shot through the village like a giant ball and was never seen or heard of again. Another was about a spider who kept a fairy prisoner inside a guitar, which he played inexpertly; one day she somehow escaped. Yet another was a dreamy story about a creature lost in the forest (either myself or a fox, I have forgotten which), who wakes up from a dream to find the solution to the trouble besetting him. I finally decided to “hold” these fairytales, a euphemism for never allowing them to find further readers.

Six years later, I finally had the manuscript of my first novel, Salar Jang’s Passion. By then I had moved to Toronto. Knowing the process, I looked up the Literary Market Place again and shortlisted 25 literary agents who specialised in literary fiction and sent them query letters with the first 50 pages of the manuscript. I had decided that I would go with the very first agent who responded.

At the publishers Modern Library, my manuscript landed on the desk of its classics editor, Judy Sternlight, who had seen the exhibition and did not need any convincing about the importance of the work. The Adventures of Amir Hamza was published to international acclaim in 2006.

As it happened, two of the 25 agents responded. One was a husband and wife team at a small literary agency, and the other one was a major Toronto-based literary agency. The smaller literary agency had written to me first, and seemed to have understood what the book was about. I sent a thank you letter to the other agency, and signed up with the smaller one. The book did not find a publisher in the US but it was picked up by a small publisher in the UK called Summersdale (now a part of Hachette, UK), and by HarperCollins in India.

During that time, I wrote another collection of tales for children, which included my first story — ‘The Cobbler’s Holiday or Why Ants Don’t Wear Shoes’ — that I had initially written in Urdu before my first, dubious collection of fairytales. My agent submitted it to Annick Press, a well-known Canadian publisher of children’s books. They liked the story but could not quite make up their mind about it. Meanwhile, I had completed my translation of The Adventures of Amir Hamza, a 10-year labour. My agent submitted it to the two major publishers of translated classics, Modern Library and Penguin.

A couple of years before I submitted my translation, a major international exhibition of the Hamza-nama paintings was held in a collaboration between the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. These paintings had been commissioned by the teenage Emperor Akbar, who was an admirer of Amir Hamza’s legend. Directed by Iranian masters Mir Sayyid Ali and Abdus Samad, supervising a large workshop of roughly 100 Persian and Indian artists, 1,400 paintings were produced for Hamza-nama, which set the direction of the Mughal miniature tradition. The paintings were part of the loot carried away from India by Nadir Shah, and fewer than 200 of these paintings survive today.

At the publishers Modern Library, my manuscript landed on the desk of its classics editor, Judy Sternlight, who had seen the exhibition and did not need any convincing about the importance of the work. The Adventures of Amir Hamza was published to international acclaim in 2006, with Time magazine, The New York Times and The Washington Post carrying major reviews.

Meanwhile, I had also changed agents, and was represented by Robert B. Wyatt (Bob) and Thomas Colchie of The Colchie Agency. Wyatt represented my friend Azhar Abidi, to whom I had dedicated The Adventures of Amir Hamza. I discussed with Bob the idea of my novel Between Clay and Dust, which I had been working on for the last six years, and also a new story that I had considered writing as a novella. Bob told me to finish this new story first, while I continued my work on Between Clay and Dust. The new story became my second novel, The Story of a Widow, published by Knopf Canada and Picador India, and later by Restless Books, US.

Bob read my collection of children’s tales and sent The Cobbler’s Holiday or Why Ants Don’t Wear Shoes to the celebrated children’s publisher Neal Porter. Neal loved the story and, 18 years after it was first written in Urdu, it was published as a picture book, illustrated by Eugene Yelchin from Neal Porter Books/Roaring Brook Press, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers.

I guess this column will also have a sequel and, in the coming weeks, I will try to juggle two half-told narratives as best I can, and must beg the reader’s indulgence.

The columnist is a novelist, author and translator. He can be reached via his website: micromaf.com

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, September 20th, 2026