Daisy Rockwell

Some Lesser Known Facts About Daisy Rockwell

• Daisy Rockwell is an American writer and translator of Hindi and Urdu-language literature. In 2022, Daisy Rockwell and Indian writer Geetanjali Shree won the International Booker Prize for the translation of Shree’s Hindi-language novel ‘Ret Samadhi’ into English titled ‘Tomb of Sand.’ She is also an artist and illustrator.

• Born into a family of artists, Rockwell grew up in a creative environment.

  

• At the beginning of her graduate school, she attended a translation seminar by A.K. Ramanujan for three months at the beginning of her graduation. The intimate seminar with people working on all different languages developed Rockwell’s interest in Hindi.

• During her second year, when she took up social sciences she made acquaintance with professor Susanne Rudolph, who used to spend every fourth year living in India with her husband, where the couple authored books together. Following a similar trajectory, she came to India and obtained wrote a thesis on the Indian novelist Upendranath Ashk.

• After meeting Upendranath Ashk in 1995, Rockwell spent the following two decades translating his 1947 Hindi novel गिरती दीवारें (Girti Divare) into English as ‘Falling Walls,’ published in 2015. The novel chronicles the struggles of a lower-middle-class Punjabi man to become a writer.
  

• In 2004, she published the book ‘Upendranath Ashk: A Critical Biography.’

• Her compilation of paintings and essays on the Global War titled ‘The Little Book of Terror’ (2012) was published by Foxhead Books.
  

• In 2014, she authored the novel ‘Taste.’ Published by Foxhead Books, the novel’s central character Daniel sets out on a cross-country quest seeking answers about his past after he makes a startling discovery through long-sealed documents.
  

• In 2016, she published the English translation of Bhisham Sahni’s 1974 Hindi novel ‘Tamas’ of the same name. Set in a city in undivided Punjab, the novel opens with a tanner named Nathu who is bribed to kill a pig, which leads to communal violence when the animal’s carcass is discovered on the steps of the local mosque the next morning.
  

• She also translated Khadija Mastur’s 1962 Urdu novel ‘Aangan’ into English titled ‘The Women’s Courtyard’ in 2018. The novel centres on the claustrophobic lives of women in the 1940s, which were circumscribed by the four walls of their homes as the outside world remained an inaccessible dream.
  

• In 2019, she published the English translation of Krishna Sobti’s biographical Hindi novel ‘Gujarat Pakistan Se Gujarat Hindustan’ into ‘A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There.’ In the autobiographical novel, Sobti talked about her first job as a governess to the child Maharaja of Sirohi, a district in the Indian state of Rajasthan in the aftermath of the partition of India.
  

• Other literary works of Upendranath Ashk which Rockwell translated include ‘In the City a Mirror Wandering’ and ‘Hats And Doctors’ and Mastur’s ‘A Promised Land.’

• In 2021, she translated Geetanjali Shree’s Hindi novel ‘Ret Samadhi’ into English titled ‘Tomb of Sand.’ The novel humorously presents the journey of an 80-year-old Indian woman to Pakistan after her husband’s death. Besides translating, she also created the cover images for both Hindi and English editions of Tomb of Sand.
  

• A skilled painter, Rockwell regularly posts her paintings on Flickr.

• On 26 April 2022, Tomb of Sand won the International Booker Prize, becoming the first Indian book to receive the accolade. Geetanjali and Daisy received 50,000 pounds literary prize, which they split evenly.

• Daisy Rockwell enjoys consuming alcoholic beverages occasionally.