‘Tomb of Sand’: First Hindi Novel nominated for International Booker Prize

• 15 Mar 2022

Hindi novelist and short story writer Geetanjali Shree’s ‘Tomb of Sand’ has become the first book translated from Hindi to be nominated for the International Booker Prize.

• Translated into English by Daisy Rockwell, it is among the 13 novels to be longlisted for the prestigious prize in 2022.
• Tomb of Sand was first published in Hindi as ‘Ret Samadhi’ in 2018.
• The novel follows an 80-year-old woman who travels to Pakistan after the death of her husband, “confronting the unresolved trauma of her teenage experiences of Partition and re-evaluating what it means to be a mother, daughter, a woman, a feminist”.

About the Prize

• The International Booker Prize is awarded annually for a single work of fiction that is translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland.
• The £50,000 prize is divided equally between the author and the translator, with the shortlisted authors and translators receiving £2500 each. The shortlist will be announced on April 7 and the winners will be named on May 26.