Tomb Of Sand first Indian language novel to win International Booker Prize

LONDON • Tomb Of Sand, a novel about an 80-year-old Indian woman's sudden decision to travel to Pakistan, was named on Thursday as the winner of the International Booker Prize, the prestigious award for fiction translated into English.

Geetanjali Shree, the book's author, and Daisy Rockwell, who translated the 739-page novel from its original Hindi, will split the prize of £50,000 (S$86,700), which they received at a ceremony in London. The novel claimed the title despite not having been reviewed by a major British newspaper.

It is the first in an Indian language to win the International Booker Prize, and the first in Hindi to even secure a nomination.

The books were selected by five judges, including Singapore author and translator Jeremy Tiang, Irish literary translator Frank Wynne, Oxford academic Merve Emre, Zimbabwean lawyer and writer Petina Gappah, and writer, broadcaster and stand-up comedienne Viv Groskop.

Mr Wynne, chair of the judges for this year's prize, said in an online news conference that Tomb Of Sand was "overwhelmingly" the judges' choice, deserving to beat the five other shortlisted novels.

Some of those books were by internationally well-known authors, including The Books Of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, a Nobel Prize-winning Polish novelist, and Heaven, by Mieko Kawakami, a Japanese author best known for Breasts And Eggs.

Mr Wynne called Tomb Of Sand an "extraordinarily exuberant and incredibly playful book", even though it deals with such topics as bereavement and India's partition from Pakistan.

Set in northern India, the book's protagonist falls into a depression after the death of her husband, then travels to Pakistan to confront the traumas of her teenage years. Mr Wynne said it was "a novel of partition unlike any novel of partition I have ever read".

The book includes some sections told from the perspective of inanimate objects, and much of the original novel depends on wordplay in Hindi. Rockwell's work on the book showed "the small miracle of translation", Mr Wynne said, borrowing a phrase from Italian author Italo Calvino.

The International Booker Prize is awarded every year to the best book translated into English and published in Britain or Ireland. It is separate from the better-known Booker Prize, awarded for novels originally written in English, but it comes with the same prize money and has helped turn some authors into stars.

NYTIMES