Geetanjali Shree and translator Daisy Rockwell win $80K International Booker Prize for novel Tomb of Sand
Geetanjali Shree is the first Indian writer to win the prize
Indian writer Geetanjali Shree and American translator Daisy Rockwell have won the International Booker Prize for Tomb of Sand, a vibrant novel with a boundary-crossing 80-year-old heroine.
The novel was the first book to be translated from Hindi to appear on the longlist. The novel follows an 80-year-old woman in northern India, struggling in the aftermath of her husband's death. When she rises again, Ma decides to live a life free of social conventions, surprising her modern, bohemian daughter. Against her family's wishes, Ma travels to Pakistan to finally face the trauma she's been suppressing since her teenage years during Partition.
The International Booker Prize, worth £50,000 ($80,219.88 Cdn), is awarded annually to a book that is translated into English and published in the U.K., or Ireland. It is run alongside the Booker Prize for English-language fiction. The prize money will be split between New Delhi-based Shree and Rockwell, who lives in Vermont.
Shree is an accomplished short story writer and novelist and Tomb of Sand is her first book to be published in the U.K. Rockwell translates Hindi and Urdu literature.
There were no Canadians on the shortlist. The other finalists, selected from a longlist of 13, included:
- Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, translated from Korean by Anton Hur
- A New Name: Septology VI-VII by Jon Fosse, translated from Norwegian by Damion Searls
- Heaven by Mieko Kawakami, translated from Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd
- Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro, translated from Spanish by Frances Riddle
- The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft
LISTEN | Jennifer Croft on Writers & Company:
Translator Frank Wynne, who chaired the judging panel, said the judges "overwhelmingly" chose Tomb of Sand after "a very passionate debate."
Tomb of Sand is published in Britain by publisher Tilted Axis Press. It was founded by translator Deborah Smith — who won the 2016 International Booker for translating Han Kang's The Vegetarian — to publish books from Asia.
The novel has not yet been published in North America, but Wynne said he expected that to change with "a flurry of offers" after its Booker victory.
"It manages to take issues of great seriousness — bereavement, loss, death — and conjure up an extraordinary choir, almost a cacophony, of voices," he said.
"It is extraordinarily fun and it is extraordinarily funny."
The prize was set up to boost the profile of fiction in other languages — which accounts for only a small share of books published in Britain — and to salute the often unacknowledged work of literary translators.
Wynne said the prize aimed to show that "literature in translation is not some form of cod liver oil that is supposed to be good for you."
The 2021 winner was David Diop's novel At Night All Blood Is Black, translated from French by Anna Moschovakis.
With files from CBC Books.
