4th death anniversary of Humayun Ahmed being observed

MNA Feature Desk: The 4th death anniversary of famous fiction writer, playwright and filmmaker Humayun Ahmed is being observed on Tuesday.

Humayun Ahmed’s two younger brothers Prof. Muhammad Zafar Iqbal and Ahsan Habib along with their other family members and relatives offered prayers at his graveyard at Nuhash Polli of Gazipur.

Several socio-cultural organizations have drawn out elaborate programs to observe the day. A Quran-khwani will be held at Nuhash Polli, after Johr prayers.

There will be also an orphan feeding program there. Volunteer organization ‘Himu Paribahan’ will organize a seminar, blood donation camp, and essay and painting competition on Humayun Ahmed.

It will also allocate leaflets among people to make consciousness about cancer. A theatre group titled ‘Mad Theatre’ will stage their production ‘Naddio Natim’ adopted from the novel ‘K Kotha Koy’ by the late legendary writer at Studio Theatre Hall of Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy.

Humayun Ahmed was born on 13 November, 1948. His breakthrough was his debut novel ‘Nondito Noroke’ published in 1972. He wrote over 200 fiction and non-fiction books, all of which were bestsellers in Bangladesh.

Ahmed’s writing style is characterized as magical realism. His books were the top sellers at the Ekushey Book Fair during the 1990s and 2000s. He won the Bangla Academy Award and the Ekushey Padak award for his contribution to Bengali literature.

In the early 1990s, Ahmed emerged as a filmmaker. He went on to make a total of eight films – mostly based on his own novels. He received six Bangladesh National Film Awards in different categories for the films Daruchini Dwip, Aguner Poroshmoni and Ghetuputra Komola.

Ahmed married Gultekin Khan in 1976. Together they had three daughters, Nova, Shila and Bipasha, and one son, Nuhash. Shila Ahmed went on to become a television and film actress. In 2003, Ahmed divorced Gultekin. He then controversially married actress Meher Afroz Shaon in 2005. He had two sons from the second marriage, Nishad and Ninit.

Ahmed had open heart surgery at Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore. A few years later, during a routine checkup, doctors found a cancerous tumor in his colon. On September 14, 2011, he was flown to Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center in New York City for treatment.

During his stay there, he wrote a novel, Deyal, based on the life of the first President of Bangladesh Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. In January 2012, he was appointed as a senior special adviser of the Bangladesh Mission to the United Nations.

On May 12, 2012, he returned to Bangladesh for two weeks. He died on July 19, 2012 at 11.20 PM BST at Bellevue Hospital in New York City.