Geetanjali Shree’s radical fiction, written in Hindi, is finding a global audience

The Conversation Australia reports that Geetanjali Shree has become the first Indian writer to win the International Booker Prize with a novel written in Hindi rather than English. Her work Tomb of Sand, translated into English by Daisy Rockwell, breaks a long pattern: previous Indian Booker Prize winners all wrote in English, despite Hindi having over six hundred million speakers worldwide. Shree deliberately subverts the postcolonial dominance of English in publishing, weaving together literary Hindi with robust regional dialect. Her achievement brings global attention to a writer who has spent four decades exploring the tension between English and her native language.

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