Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand becomes first Hindi novel to win International Booker Prize
Author Geetanjali Shree’s novel Tomb of Sand, translated into English by US-based translator Daisy Rockwell, won the International Booker Prize 2022. Shree’s novel was originally published in Hindi as Ret Samadhi. It is the first-ever Hindi novel to win the Booker Prize.
“I never dreamt of the Booker, I never thought I could. What a huge recognition -- I’m amazed, delighted, honoured and humbled,” Geetanjali Shree said in her acceptance speech.
The winners will be awarded GPB 50,000 (Rs 49 lakh), which will be split evenly between the author Geetanjali Shree and the translator Daisy Rockwell. Moreover, the title of the Booker Prize means greater recognition of the work around the world and an increase in sales of the book.
About the book: Tomb of Sand tells the story of an 80-year-old woman, broken from the death of her husband, and how she picks herself up from the grief. The woman decides to visit Pakistan to confront her past and her trauma of Partition. Essentially, the book is a protest against the destructive impact of borders between countries, genders, and religions.
“The way anything and anyone narrates (sic) some part of the tale - birds, butterflies, even doors and walls and the road, and also a character who apologises for joining in the narration since he does not belong to the story, but is doing it since he happens to be there on the spot by chance! It somehow became emblematic of the unity of all things and also of the rich plurality of the world. And, of course, it kept showing the fallaciousness of borders,” Shree told the Booker Prize in an interview.
Inspiration for the book: Geetanjali told the Booker Prize that the “image of an old, bed-ridden woman’s back, who seemed to care to live no more and pushed deeper into the wall, as if to bury herself in it” gradually captured her imagination and beckoned her to write the story.
Shree explained that she believes in what the famous poet AK Ramanujan says: “You do not choose and pursue your poems. You put yourself in a place where they happen to you.”
Who is Geetanjali Shree? Geetanjali Shree was born in Mainpuri, Uttar Pradesh. She is currently based in New Delhi. She has authored three novels and several collections of short stories, some of which have been translated into English, French, German, Serbian and Korean.
Who is Daisy Rockwell? Among this year’s nominees were several translated works. Daisy Rockwell, who translated the Hindi original book by Geetanjali Shree, ensured that the story resounded with the author’s unique style of writing and storytelling.
Rockwell explained that while her experience was mostly in translating mid-twentieth-century Hindi classics, Tomb of Stone or Ret Samadhi was her first time translating contemporary work. She said that it was a liberating experience as she could use more modern-day slang in her translation. But she also recounted how difficult it was to translate tricky paragraphs while trying to keep the meaning and tone of the narration true to the original.
The International Booker Prize: The Booker Prize is awarded to full-length novels written in English and published in the UK and Ireland. The novels reviewed for the prize also include novels that are translated into English from other languages and published in the UK and/or Ireland. Novels that won the Booker Prize like Life of Pi, The White Tiger, etc have also been adapted into movies and TV shows.
You can read the Tomb of Sand in Hindi or English; and fun fact, the Hindi one is just 384 pages, compared to the English one which is 739 pages long. Rockwell says she and a fellow translator Mahmud Rahman have observed that most Hindi/Bengali to English translations are at least 20% longer.