Indian author Geetanjali Shree’s Ret Samadhi (Hindi) has emerged as the winner of the International Book Prize announced recently, in its translated version Tomb of Sand by Daisy Rockwell. She is the first Indian to win the award.
By woman about a woman
Tomb of Sand has an 80-year-old woman, Ma, at the center of the plot. It narrates her journey towards the confrontation of her past, following the death of her husband, and undergoing depression. It conjures up an engaging story of how she chooses to encounter the painful memories of the Partition, in Pakistan with power, poignancy, and playfulness. As per reports, Geetanjali created her central character on her mother, as she explored what it means to be a mother, a daughter, and a woman, through Ma.
News reports quoted Frank Wynne, the chair of judges, as saying, “This is a luminous novel of India and partition, but one whose spellbinding brio and fierce compassion weaves youth and age, male and female, family and nation into a kaleidoscopic whole.”
The award was constituted in 2005 to complement the Booker Prize. While it was called the Man Booker International Prize, in 2019, it was renamed the International Booker Prize. Before the win, Mahasweta Devi was the only Indian woman writer to have been nominated for the award.
The award is given to any work in English published across the world or to English translations, while the Booker Prize established in 1969 is for English work published in the UK. Indian women writers like Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai have won the latter.
