Geetanjali Shree at Bocas Lit Fest 2024
Ira Mathur, Guardian journalist and author of Love The Dark Days (winner of the 2023 Bocas Prize for Literature, non-fiction), interviewed the International Booker Prize winner Geetanjali Shree to a packed audience at Nalis at the recently concluded Bocas Lit Fest, the largest literary gathering in the Anglophone Caribbean in Port-of-Spain, on April 27.
Shree, who travelled from India especially for the event at the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, made history when her novel, “Tomb Of Sand” (Tilted Axis Press, 2021), became the first Hindi novel to win the International Booker Prize Award in 2022. The book was first published in Hindi as ‘Ret Samadhi’ and was later translated into English by American translator Daisy Rockwell. With five novels, a biography of Hindi and Urdu writer Premchand, short stories, and academic papers, Shree is a distinguished literary name in India and now globally. “Tomb of Sand” has been translated into a dozen languages. A US edition was published by HarperCollins.
The book traces the transformative journey of 80-year-old Ma, who becomes depressed after the death of her husband. She then decides to travel to Pakistan, confronting trauma that had remained unresolved since she was a teenager who survived the Partition riots in 1947, when India and Pakistan were split in two and more than a Muslim. Hindus butchered one another, and many were displaced. Rather than respond to tragedy with seriousness, Geetanjali Shree’s playful tone and exuberant wordplay result in a book that is engaging, funny, and utterly original, at the same time as being an urgent and timely protest against the destructive impact of borders and boundaries, whether between religions, countries, or genders.
Books by authors from the US Virgin Islands, T&T, and Jamaica have won the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in the poetry, fiction, and nonfiction categories. “How to Say Babylon” by Jamaican author Safiya Sinclair was announced as the overall 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature winner. The Ferguson Report: An Erasure by Nicole Sealey was selected as the winner of the Poetry genre. Hungry Ghosts by Trinidadian Kevin Jared Hosein is the winner in the fiction category.