Geetanjali Shree

Geetanjali Shree (; born 12 June 1957), also known as Geetanjali Pandey, (Her birth name is Geetanjali Pandey, but she took her mother's first name Shree as her last name.) while its English translation by Nita Kumar was published by Niyogi Books in 2017. In 2022, her novel Ret Samadhi, translated into English as Tomb of Sand by Daisy Rockwell, won the International Booker Prize. Aside from fiction, she has written critical works on Premchand.

Early life and education Shree was born in the city of Mainpuri in Uttar Pradesh state on 12 June 1957. Her father, Anirudh Pandey, was a civil servant, causing her family to live in various towns throughout Uttar Pradesh. Shree says that it was this upbringing in Uttar Pradesh, along with a lack of children's books in English, that gave her a rich connection to Hindi.

At university, she studied history. She completed a BA at Lady Shri Ram College, and a master's degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. After beginning her PhD work at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda on the Hindi writer Munshi Premchand, Shree became more interested in Hindi literature. She wrote her first short story during her PhD, and turned to writing after graduation.

The English translation of her novel Mai catapulted her to fame. The novel is about three generations of women and the men around them, in a North Indian middle-class family. Mai has been translated into several languages, including Serbian and Korean. It has also been translated into English by Nita Kumar, who was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Translation Prize, and into Urdu by Bashir Unwan with a preface by Intizar Hussain. and a German translation by .

Shree's second novel Hamara Shahar Us Baras is set loosely after the incidents of Babri Masjid demolition.

Her fourth novel, Khālī jagah (2006), has been translated into English by Nivedita Menon as The Empty Space, French by Nicola Pozza as Une place vide, and German by Georg Lechner and Nivedita Menon as Im leeren Raum.

Her fifth novel, Ret Samadhi (2018), has been commended by Alka Saraogi for "its sweeping imagination and sheer power of language, unprecedented and uninhibited". It has been translated into English by Daisy Rockwell as Tomb of Sand, and into French by Annie Montaut as Au-delà de la frontière.