- Lived:
- b. 12 June 1957, Mainpuri, Uttar Pradesh — a childhood across the small towns of UP, a writing life in Delhi, and, since 2022, a readership everywhere (living, as of September 2026)
- Field:
- the Hindi novel — an experimental modernist in a tradition that runs from Premchand, working alongside theatre and history
- The Big Idea:
- An eighty-year-old widow turns her back on her family, then gets out of bed and walks toward the border Partition drew through her life — told in a Hindi so playful it was called untranslatable, until Daisy Rockwell translated it and the two of them won the International Booker Prize, the first for a book in any Indian language.
- In their words:
- At the Booker podium she said, to this effect, that she had never dreamt of that prize — and that behind her and her book stood a rich and flourishing literary tradition in Hindi and other South Asian languages (as of September 2026)
- If you remember one thing:
- For thirty years she wrote demanding, brilliant Hindi novels that most of India never read — and when the world's biggest translation prize finally found her, she used the microphone to point behind herself, at the languages of home.