Current Affairs - Famous Books

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.

• "Balakot Air Strike: How India Avenged Pulwama" is written by Navy veteran Manan Bhatt.
• The book revisits the chain of real-life events surrounding February 2019 Pulwama suicide bombing attack, and India's strong hit-back in the form of Balakot airstrikes twelve days later.

• Former RBI Governor Bimal Jalan’s new book ‘The India Story’ - focuses on India’s economic history and aims to provide lessons for the future of India’s political economy.
• He has previously written three books on various aspects of India’s economic and political history, namely ‘India Then and Now’ (2020), ‘India Ahead’ (2018) and ‘Politics Trumps Economics’ (2012), the latter co-authored with economist Pulapre Balakrishnan.