Warwick Prize for Women in Translation: Geetanjali Shree’s ‘Tomb of Sand’ among 14 longlisted books

The International Booker Prize winner Tomb of Sand, translated by Daisy Rockwell from Geetanjali Shree’s original Hindi novel Ret Samadhi, is one of the 14 books longlisted for the £1000 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation in 2022.

The prize was established by the University of Warwick in 2017 to address the gender imbalance in translated literature and to increase the number of international women’s voices especially among British and Irish readers.

This year, the competition received a total of 138 eligible entries representing 33 languages – the largest number of submissions till date. The longlist covers 11 languages, with translations from Greek and Hindi represented for the first time in 2022, and 12 publishers. Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk and her translator Jennifer Croft feature on the longlist for the second time. Translators Peter Graves, Mara Faye Lethem and Ginny Tapley Takemori also make their second appearance.

This year’s longlist includes Argentinian and Georgian poetry, Japanese short stories, and novels from Argentina, Catalonia, India and Syria. Three of the longlisted works are literary non-fiction: of these two offer a collective history of a place – an East Berlin suburb is portrayed through the stories told to the author when she was working as a chiropodist; in another, the metamorphosis of a Swedish village is recounted through a series of interviews with its people’ and the third non-fiction title narrates the natural history, and emotional and cultural significance, of slime.

The longlisted titles, in alphabetical order:

• The Book of Mother, Violaine Huisman, translated from the French by Leslie Camhi (Little, Brown Book Group)
  
• The Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
  
• Brickmakers, Selva Almada, translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott (Charco Press)
  
• Marzahn, Mon Amour, Katja Oskamp, translated from the German by Jo Heinrich (Peirene Press)
  
• Men Don’t Cry, Faïza Guène, translated from the French by Sarah Ardizzone (Cassava Republic Press)
  
• Osebol: Voices from a Swedish Village, Marit Kapla, translated from the Swedish by Peter Graves (Penguin Random House)
  
• Planet of Clay, Samar Yazbek, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price (World Editions)
  
• Slime: A Natural History, Susanne Wedlich, translated from the German by Ayça Türkoğlu (Granta)
  
• Things Remembered and Things Forgotten, Kyoko Nakajima, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori and Ian McCullough MacDonald (Sort of Books)
  
• Three Summers, Margarita Liberaki, translated from the Greek by Karen Van Dyck (Penguin Random House)
  
• To Love A Woman, Diana Bellessi, translated from the Spanish by Leo Boix (Poetry Translation Centre)
  
• Tomb of Sand, Geetanjali Shree, translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell (Tilted Axis Press)
  
• When I Sing, Mountains Dance, Irene Solà, translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem (Granta)
  
• Why I No Longer Write Poems, Diana Anphimiadi, translated from the Georgian by Natalia Bukia-Peters and Jean Sprackland (Bloodaxe Books and Poetry Translation Centre)