Events

Upon the publication of Aftab Ahmad's, MESAAS, Urdu translation of Ret Samadhi (Tomb of Sand), he is joined by writer Geetanjali Shree and English translator Daisy Rockwell, co-winners of 2022 International Booker Prize.

Moderated by Isabel Huacuja Alonso, Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies.

Co-sponsored by the Barnard College Translation Studies Program, the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Literary Translation at Columbia at the School of the Arts, the South Asia Institute, and the Society of Fellows and the Heyman Institute for the Humanities.

Aftab Ahmad is a Senior Language Lecturer in Hindi and Urdu in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies.  He earned his BA at Aligarh Muslim University and an MA and PhD at Jawaharlal University.  His publications include translations from Urdu (with Matt Reeck) of Mirages of the Mind  (Aab-e-gum) by Mushtaque Ahmad Yusufi (2015), and Bombay Stories by Saadat Hasan Mano (2012).

Daisy Rockwell is a painter and award-winning translator of Hindi and Urdu literature. She paints under the takhallus, or alias, Lapata (pronounced ‘laapataa’), which is Urdu for “missing,” or “absconded.”. She earned a PhD in South Asian literature at the University of Chicago. Rockwell has published numerous translations from Hindi and Urdu, including Upendranath Ashk’s Falling Walls (2015) and his Hats and Doctors (2013), Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas (2016), and Khadija Mastur’s The Women’s Courtyard. Her translation of Krishna Sobti’s final novel, A Gujarat here, a Gujarat there (2019) was awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work in 2019. Her translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand (2021) won the 2022 International Booker Prize and the 2022 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. Other works by Rockwell include Upendranath Ashk: A Critical Biography (2004); The Little Book of Terror, a volume of paintings and essays on the Global War on Terror (2012); and her novel Taste, published by Foxhead Books in 2014.

Geetanjali Shree is a novelist and short-story writer based in New Delhi, India. She is the author of several short stories and five novels. Her 2000 novel Mai was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award in 2001. In 2022, her novel Ret Samadhi (2018), translated into English as Tomb of Sand by Daisy Rockwell, won the International Booker Prize. Her other novels include Hamara Shahar Us Baras (1998); Tirohit (2001) [published in English as The Roof Beneath Her Feet (2013)]; Khali Jagah (2006) [published asThe Empty Space (2011)]/.Aside from fiction, she has written the critical biography Between Two Worlds: An Intellectual Biography of Premchand (1989).