Raza Naeem is an independent Pakistani Arabic-speaking social scientist, book critic and translator based in Lahore. He is also a longtime activist of the Communist Mazdoor Kissan Party (CMKP), being involved in organizing and mobilizing workers, peasants and youth in Lahore and Karachi for over a decade. He has been trained in Political Economy from the University of Leeds in UK, and in Middle Eastern History and Anthropology from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, US. He has travelled and lived in, and written widely about Egypt, Yemen and Turkey over the years. He is presently working on three books, namely, a political and cultural history of Yemen post-Arab Spring, on the contradictions of bourgeois democracy in Pakistan, as well as translating Saadat Hasan Manto’s Letters to Uncle Sam and other postcolonial essays from the Urdu. His published articles on Manto, and selected translations from Manto, have already been translated into Tamil. He has recently been awarded a prestigious British Council and Charles Wallace Trust Fellowship 2013-14 to continue his work on Manto’s essays at the University of Bradford in UK.
