Geetanjali Shree

Geetanjali Shree (Hindi: गीतांजलि श्री; born 12 June 1957), also known as Geetanjali Pandey, is an Indian Hindi-language 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, while its English translation by Nita Kumar was published by Niyogi Books in 2017. In 2022, her novel Ret Samadhi (2018), translated into English as Tomb of Sand by Daisy Rockwell, won the International Booker Prize. Aside from fiction, she has written critical works on Premchand.

Quotes

 * ...In the writers’ world there is much fun and frolic, and spite and praise...
 * ...Along with all this, today’s world, dominated by the ruthless grasping market and the questionable politics making inroads everywhere, has surrounded me in ways like never before. I have to confront it more directly and also protect my literary space from its pollution...
 * ... So for me Partition has specific subcontinental implications, but it also spans the larger world...
 * ...The follies of mankind from times immemorial have led to broken homes and illogical political identities, severed selves and truncated stories, dislocated populations and homeless refugees...
 * ... I do not care for writing with a worked out plan of beginning, middle and end. Creativity can be an unexpected journey for the writer also...
 * ...So many things go into the making of a creative work – a linguistic-literary tradition, an entire cultural lineage, history, one’s own experience and that of others distilled through observation, new readings and lessons learnt, hope and despair and playfulness and sadness, all feeding the writers’ imagination in tangible and not-so-tangible ways...
 * ... Writing emotionally-charged scenes – independent of whether they resonate with my own life – may leave me with some sort of an enervating feeling and may also produce a compensatory aesthetic satisfaction, but they can also sap me, filling me with an incredible exhaustion...
 * ...Self-critique is always there, as part of my intuition. It is this that produces, in the event of certain outcomes, that thrill of what you call ‘surprise’. It is also the pitiless slave-driver that keeps tormenting me, saying ‘no, not this, not this.’...
 * INTERVIEW WITH GEETANJALI SHREE