India, Oct. 24 -- Pakistani writer Azra Abbas's book-length prose poem, Sleep Journeys, travels from Urdu into the Anglophone literary sphere via International Booker Prize winner Daisy Rockwell's translation. The book, that won the 2025 Wisconsin Prize before it became a Penguin Modern Classics edition this year, is startling in its refusal to be understood or explained. Like a fever dream or a voyage into fantasy, it is something that you can feel only through a first-hand encounter.

Abbas, who is from Karachi, is a pioneer of experimental free verse in Urdu. The choice to embrace this form could not have been easy, given the ghazal's dominant stature in Urdu literature. Divided into three cantos, Nii.nd kii Masaafate.n was first publi...