Sukhbir (9 July 1925 – 22 February 2012), alias Balbir Singh, was a Punjabi novelist, short-story writer, poet and essayist.

While he was in jail in Nasik, one of his editor friends in whose magazine his poems were to be published, changed his name to Sukhbir, to avoid the authorities' attention.

He started publishing in the leading Punjabi journal of the time, Preet Lari, edited by Gurbaksh Singh Preetlari.

Simultaneously, he started taking an interest in the activities of Communist Party of India, and had great regard for its founder, Puran Chand Joshi.

He reflected hard on the communist ideology and chose to step aside to find his own way, while remaining committed to the Marxist thought and philosophy.

Soon thereafter, he left his job as a lecturer at Khalsa College, Mumbai to take up writing as a full-time career, which was unusual and a risky proposition at the time considering the fate of writers in the country.

Sukhbir's major literary influences were John Steinbeck, Anton Chekhov, Irving Stone, Sigmund Freud, T. S. Eliot, Pablo Neruda, Sardar Jafri, Krishan Chander, and Rajinder Singh Bedi.

His writings depicted the inner travails of the human mind as a significant aspect of the lives of the characters, and these thinkers dwelt upon the ambiguous nature of mental processes.

Karl Marx's life and works also had a lasting influence on him, as Sukhbir identified with his empathy and concern for the underprivileged in society.

A noted example is the story "Ruki Hoyi Raat (The Suspended Night)" in which the narrator in his reminiscences is recalling his long lost childhood friend who has become a rebel and is evading the repressive authorities.

[2] Sukhbir brought a new sensibility to the Punjabi novel by introducing lyrical beauty in prose and distributing his narrative material into pictorial scenes and adding dimensions to characters through exchange of dialogue.

The poems in Nain Naksh (The Features) are written specifically in techniques of modern painting like Portrait, Nude, Collage, Still Life, Landscape, Self-Portrait, etc.

In the November 1973 issue of Illustrated Weekly of India, the literary editor Nissim Ezekiel gave him an entire page for his poems – a rare honour at that time for a poet.

Other translations include short stories, plays and letters of Maxim Gorky, Mikhail Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don, Askad Mukhtar's Sisters (Bhaina), and Konstantin Paustovsky's The Golden Rose (Sunehra Gulab).

He wrote various letters and articles on literary, political and social issues engaging in dialogue with truth, honesty, sympathy and reason.

[citation needed] Sukhbir's most acclaimed novel is Sarkaan Te Kamre (Streets and Rooms), dealing with the metropolitan life of Mumbai, which was published in 1964.

The title of the novel is poignantly evocative, telling the sad plight of dwellers of a metropolis who have no homes to live in, but have streets for the day and shabby rooms for the night.