Who Is Daisy Rockwell? Translator Of Booker Prize 2022 Winning Book Tomb Of Sand

An artist, writer and translator based in northern New England, Daisy Rockwell jointly won the International Booker Prize 2022 with Indian author Geetanjali Shree for the book Tomb of Sand. Rockwell translated the book from Shree's Hindi language work Ret Samadhi.

Rockwell is also the writer of Upendranath Ashk: A Critical Biography, The Little Book Of Terror and Taste. Her translations include Upendranath Ashk’s Fallen Walls and Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas, both Penguin Classics publications.

With a PhD in South Asian Literature from the University Of Chicago, she posts her paintings regularly on Flickr to show her work widely. She paints under the alias, Lapata, which is Urdu for “missing,” or “absconded,” as in “my luggage is missing,” or “the bandits have absconded.” 

Rockwell grew up in a family of artists in western Massachusetts, some of whose work decorates the exteriors of chinaware and bewitches the waiting rooms of dentists’ offices, and others whose artistic turnout has found more superior audiences.

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“My relationship with Hindi is absolutely different from that of a native speaker. I am an apt language learner, but I did not start learning Hindi until I was 19. By then, as studies have shown, your brain is less capable of soaking in new languages. It took me a long time to be able to read or speak Hindi with any fluency, and even now I make ridiculous mistakes and find some idiomatic phrases and words impenetrable,” she says in a 2018 interview with Scroll.

She added, “I do think all of this difficulty makes me extremely attentive to linguistic details and nuances. Hindi and English do not flow into each other in my mind, the way they might for a bilingual person, and when I am translating from Hindi into English, I’m carrying every word and phrase to a completely different territory.”

Starting to read Ashk in graduate school, Rockwell was drawn to his detailed literary production including his poems, quotations and creativity. “But I actually have five book translations in the translation/publication pipeline right now, and only one is by Ashk, the second of his Falling Walls (Girti Divarein) series. That volume, In the City, a Mirror Wandering (Shahar Mein Ghoomta Aina), was due out from Penguin RandomHouse last summer but is held up over a copyright problem. Then I have two novels by the Urdu author Khadija Mastur coming out from PRH: The Women’s Courtyard (Aangan) will be published in September of this year, and Zameen, which I am working on right now, will come out next year,” she said.

Feature Image Credit: Scroll.