Geetanjali Shree (born 12 June 1957) is an Indian novelist and short-story writer who writes in Hindi. In 2022 her novel Ret Samadhi, translated into English by Daisy Rockwell as Tomb of Sand, won the International Booker Prize. It was the first book written in any Indian language to win the prize, and the first translated from Hindi.
Quick Facts
| Birth name | Geetanjali Pandey |
| Born | 12 June 1957, Mainpuri, Uttar Pradesh, India |
| Age | 69 |
| Occupation | Novelist, short-story writer |
| Language | Hindi |
| Education | Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi; Jawaharlal Nehru University (M.A. History); Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (Ph.D.) |
| Spouse | Sudhir Chandra (historian) |
| Honour | International Booker Prize (2022) |
| Lives in | New Delhi |
Early Life
Geetanjali grew up in several towns of Uttar Pradesh, where her father was a civil servant. She has said that this childhood, with few English children’s books to hand, gave her a rich grounding in Hindi. She took “Shree”, her mother’s first name, as her surname. She studied history in Delhi and wrote her doctoral thesis on the Hindi writer Premchand.
Career
Her first story appeared in the literary magazine Hans in 1987. Her first novel, Mai (1993), a portrait of three generations of women in a North Indian household, was widely praised and translated. Hamara Shahar Us Baras (1998) dealt with the communal tension that followed the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Tirohit (2001) and Khali Jagah (2006) followed.
Ret Samadhi (2018) tells of an eighty-year-old woman in North India who sinks into depression after her husband’s death and then, to her family’s alarm, gets up, befriends a transgender woman and insists on travelling to Pakistan to face the memories of Partition she has buried. The novel is playful and full of wordplay, with chapters told by birds, doors and a road. The £50,000 prize, announced in London on 26 May 2022, was shared equally between author and translator.
Shree has worked for many years with the Delhi theatre group Vivadi, writing and adapting scripts.
Personal Life
She is married to the historian Sudhir Chandra and lives in New Delhi. A public event in her honour at Agra in 2022 was cancelled after a complaint that the novel hurt religious sentiments.
Selected Works
Frequently Asked Questions
When and where was Geetanjali Shree born?
Geetanjali Shree was born on 12 June 1957 in Mainpuri, Uttar Pradesh, India and is 69 years old.
What is Geetanjali Shree’s occupation?
Occupation: Novelist, short-story writer.
Featured image: Geetanjali Shree at the Jaipur Literature Festival, 2025. Photo by Sriya Sarkar, licensed under CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
