Geetanjali Shree

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Geetanjali Shree is an Indian novelist and short-story writer who is popular for her Hindi-language novel Ret Samadhi (2018), which was translated into English as Tomb of Sand by Daisy Rockwell. In 2022, Tomb of Sand won the prestigious International Booker Prize.Ancestrally, she belongs to Ghazipur District, Gondaur village, Uttar Pradesh.Geetanjali Shree grew up in the eastern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, where her father was posted as a civil servant. Although she received her education in the local English-medium schools of UP, Shrees family and surroundings saturated her in the Hindi Language.Apart from being a Civil servant, her father was also a writer. However, he did not support Shrees dream to become a Hindi writer as he believed that writing in English would be more prosperous. In an interview, while talking about her fathers opinion, she said, My father was of the opinion that Ill ruin my life if I wrote in Hindi. He would say that the future belongs to EnglishI studied in English medium but my mother spoke Hindi and that language was my mother tongue. It was the post-freedom era and people of the country felt love towards their own language. During that time, we even got to hear many Hindi fiction writers..Growing up in Allahabad, UP, she had the chance to interact with prolific Hindi and Urdu writers like Sumitranandan Pant, Firaq Gorakhpuri, and Mahadevi Verma.A voracious reader since childhood, she developed an interest in Hindi literature by reading novels like Panchatantra, Chandamama, Parag, and Nandan.Celebrated Indian writer Munshi Premchands granddaughter was a close friend of Geetanjali Shree. She attributes her inclination toward literature to Munshi Premchands household. In an interview, Geetanjali said, My very close friendship with Munshi Premchands granddaughter and close links from my childhood on with her entire family, I think, played a very positive role in sensitising me to culture. Theirs was a household full of practitioners and learners of Indian music and literature..While listing the wide variety of literary works that she has read over the years in an interview, she said, Reading was a major pastime. Very haphazard though it was. Lots of the Russian greats, the Victorian women greats, French classics, an odd Knut Hamson here, a Max Havelaar there, later Calvino, Kafka, Kundera, Latin American literature, Japanese literature, Indian writers of Bengal, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala, and Hindi writers upto my own times, like Krishna Sobti, Nirmal Verma, Shrilal Shukla, Vinod Kumar Shukla, etc..Her first forayed into Hindi literature while pursuing PhD in Munshi Premchands literary work when she converted her compilation of work into a book.After obtaining her doctorate degree, she took up a teaching job at Jamia Millia Islamia and Zakir Husain College in New Delhi. While she was juggling her teaching job with writing, she faced difficulty in delivering History lectures in English and writing her novels in Hindi. It was her supportive husband who advised her to resign from her teaching job and become a full-time writer.