It was the first time writer Geetanjali Shree and translator Daisy Rockwell met in person when they met earlier this week in London. Covid-19 had guaranteed they couldn’t meet for the past two years while they worked on the English translation of Shree’s Hindi book Ret Samadhi (2018, Rajkamal Prakashan), which would be released as Tomb of Sand in 2021 (Tilted Axis Press). They hadn’t even interacted on Zoom, the pandemic’s substitute for face-to-face conversation.
Their friendship grew slowly over time, over “hundreds of emails” and lengthy talks about the translation process, much like the novel they now share.
Tomb of Sand received the 2022 International Man Booker Prize on Thursday, making it the first novel published in an Indian language to do so. It is also the award’s first recognition of a work translated from Hindi.
“We were gripped by the strength, the poignancy, and the fun of Tomb of Sand, Geetanjali Shree’s polyphonic book of identity and belonging, in Daisy Rockwell’s exuberant, coruscating translation,” said Frank Wynne, Irish translator and jury chair, in announcing the prize. This is a brilliant story about India and Partition, but one that knits youth and age, male and female, family and nation into a kaleidoscopic whole with captivating brio and strong compassion.”
The International Booker Prize, formerly known as the Man Booker International Prize, was established in 2004 to honour a contemporary author of any country for a body of work published in English or in English translation every two years.
The £50,000 prize has been given yearly since 2016 to a book that has been translated into English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. Both the writer and the translator share the prize equally.
For At Night All Blood is Black, French author David Diop and translator Anna Moschovakis received it in 2021. The Discomfort of Evening, by Dutch writer Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and translator Michele Hutchison, won the prize in 2020.
Tomb of Sand is a novella set in north India that explores borders — between nations, faiths, and genders — while following the journey of Ma ji, the story’s octogenarian heroine, whose husband’s death forces her to reconsider her decisions.
The Vermont-based company Painter, writer, and translator Norman Rockwell is a multi-talented artist. She has received several awards for her translations of Hindi and Urdu classics such as Upendranath Ashk’s Falling Walls (2015), Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas (2016), and Khadija Mastur’s The Women’s Courtyard (2018).
A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There is her 2019 translation of Sobti’s A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There is The Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Translation Prize was granted by the Modern Language Association. In 2019, Rockwell was also named the winner of the English PEN Translation Awards.
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