LONDON — For the first time, a book written in an Indian language has won the International Booker Prize. “Tomb of Sand”, by the Hindi novelist Geetanjali Shree and translated by Daisy Rockwell, took the 2022 award on Thursday night — a victory for Indian literature, for small publishers, and for the patient art of translation.
The novel tells of an 80-year-old woman in northern India who, after her husband’s death, emerges from depression to reclaim her life — eventually travelling to Pakistan to confront the ghosts of Partition. It is playful, formally daring and rooted in the rhythms of Hindi that Rockwell, an American translator and painter, carried into English over years of work.
The £50,000 prize is shared equally between writer and translator — a feature unique among the big awards, and one the organisers point to when the argument over translation’s status flares. Rockwell’s win makes her the first American translator to take the prize.
The book was published in Britain by Tilted Axis Press, a tiny outfit run largely by volunteers, which took it on after it won a major prize in India. Its victory over shortlistees including the Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk is being celebrated in Delhi as a landmark for Hindi letters.
Shree, 64, is the author of several novels and story collections and a central figure in contemporary Hindi writing. On Thursday night, speaking partly in Hindi, she said the award belonged not just to her but to a whole language and literary tradition that had arrived, at last, on this stage.
Media-Society.com is a press network association based in Spain, founded in 2020. More at www.media-society.com.
