Usha Priyamwada

Usha Priyamwada is also known as Usha Priyamvada, Usha Nilsson, or Usha Saksena. She is an Indian short story writer and novelist mainly in Hindi and a translator from Hindi to English. Also, she is a professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. She was born on December 24, 1930. Usha Priyamwada’s place of birth is Kanpur, British India. She took English Literature at the University of Allahabad and completed her undergraduate, master’s, and doctorate degrees from the same university. Later, she achieved a Fulbright scholarship for post-doctoral studies at the University of Indiana, Bloomington, in 1961. She was the youngest of three daughters of her mother, Priyamvada. Her mother suffered social prejudice for being a widow. She married Kim Nilsson, and later, she separated in 1977. In 1981, she remarried Per Nykrog, a professor at Harvard University. In 2014, her husband died. She has been living in Madison, Wisconsin, in the USA. Her alternate residence is in Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, India, where she spends several months a year for her Hindi writings.

Usha Saksena was engaged as an assistant professor at Allahabad University. She also taught at Lady Sriram College, New Delhi. Then she went to the United States in 1961. Usha Saksena went to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1964. She joined the South Asian Studies Department to teach Indian Literature and the Hindi language. In 1968, she was granted tenure, and in 1977, she became a full-time professor. The advanced textbooks for the Hindi language, prepared by Usha Priyamwada under the request of the United States Department of Education, were widely used at the nation’s universities. She has worked on two reading books in Hindi and a collection of short stories at the behest. When she started working on novels and short stories, Usha Nilsson attached Priyamvada, her mother’s name, into her pen name, making it Usha Priyamvada.

Her debut novel, named “Pachpan Khambe Laal Deewarein,” published in 1961. The novel was used in a film by the BBC and later in an Indian television series. In 2021, the novel was translated into English by Daisy Rockwell, and it was named “Fifty-Five Pillars, Red Walls,” which proved to be a cult classic among middle-class Hindi readers. From January 1989, she started to broadcast weekly bulletins on life in Wisconsin of BBC’s Letter from America series. In 1976, she was honored with the Premchand Prize for her collection of short stories by the Government of Uttar Pradesh. Also, she won the Padma Bhushan Moturi Satyanarayan Puraskar for her lifetime work from the Indian government in 2009.