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Thursday 27 August 2026, 6pm - 7pm, ACST

Online & Allan Scott Auditorium, Hawke Building,
Adelaide University - City Campus West
55 North Terrace Adelaide

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27 August 2026

an evening with
geetanjali shree

Tomb of Sand.png

Geetanjali Shree

an evening with
geetanjali shree

Presented by The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre

Join us for a special event with acclaimed New Delhi-based author Geetanjali Shree, in conversation with Dr Mridula Nath Chakraborty.

Winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for her novel Tomb of Sand, Shree made literary history as the first author writing in Hindi - or any Indian language - to receive the International Booker Prize.⁠

Confronting the experiences of Partition, Tomb of Sand also explores what it means to be a mother, a daughter, a woman and a feminist. The novel was shortlisted for the 2021 Emile Guimet Prize for Asian Literature and received the 2025 Luna Virino International Award.

Geetanjali has written five other novels - including Mai (Mai: Silently Mother), Hamara Shahar Us Baras (Our City That Year), Tirohit (The Roof Beneath Their Feet), Khali Jagah (Empty Space), and Sah-sa (translation out shortly titled All At Once) - as well as five short story collections. Writing essays and delivering talks in both Hindi and English, her work is widely translated and read around the world.

A founding member of the Delhi-based theatre group Vivadi, Shree also works on stage scripts. Frequently invited to international residencies, fellowships, and festivals, she recently completed a DAAD writer-in-residence program in Berlin.

Don’t miss this opportunity to hear from one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary international literature, celebrated for her innovative use of language and structure.

More information about Geetanjali Shree
Discover the shortlist: Geetanjali Shree, ‘As a writer, stories imbue your senses’
Booker Prize Winner Geetanjali Shree is ‘Untrammeled and Untamed’

Copies of Tomb of Sand will be available for purchase in the Auditorium foyer on the night of the event.

In association with The Wheeler Centre, Byron Writers Festival and Sydney Writers' Festival

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Image Credits of Geetanjali Shree, Top: Gagan Brar, Left: Soofi
Below: Dr Mridula Nath Chakraborty, Credit: Thuy Vy

Dr Mridula Nath Chakraborty
senior lecturer, monash university

Dr Mridula Nath Chakraborty is based at Monash University where she teaches, researches and publishes on postcolonial feminist studies; diasporic/national literatures in English and in translation; and cinema/culinary traditions of the Indian subcontinent. Mridula has edited Being Bengali: at home and in the world, an enquiry into the intellectual history of this linguistic group from Bangladesh and India.

Her translations include Abohelaar Bhangon Naame Booke/Broken by Neglect, a bilingual edition of Nunga poet and 2017 Windham-Campbell prize-winner, Ali Cobby Eckermann’s poetry from English to Bangla (Jadavpur University Press: 2014), and A Treasury of Bangla Stories (Srishti 1997). She has edited special issues on Asian Australian Identities titled Embodiments and Inhabitations (Journal of Intercultural Studies) and Asian Australians (Melbourne Asia Review ). She is the commissioning co-editor for Creative, Social and Transnational Perspectives on Translation (Taylor & Francis). Mridula has convened literary-cultural diplomacy projects between Australia and India, such as Australia-India Literatures International Forum (finalist at the inaugural Australian Arts in Asia Award 2013), the Autumn School in Literary Translation, and Literary Commons: Writing Australia-India in the Asian Century with Indigenous, Dalit and Multilingual Tongues.

An outcome of these collaborations is a special issue in Cordite Poetry Review of 45 translations in 25 languages from Dalit, Indigenous and tribal poetry in Australia and India. Subcontinental writing in these bhasha traditions is her passion and she would like to see the diversity and audacity of bhasha sahitya disseminated and received the world over.

Presented by
The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre

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Jacinta Thompson

Executive Director &
Events and Exhibitions Producer

+61 (0)8 8302 0651
jacinta.thompson@adelaide.edu.au

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Hawke Building - Level 5, Adelaide City Campus West
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Adelaide, South Australia 5000

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While the views presented by speakers within The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre public program are their own and are not necessarily those of either Adelaide University or The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre, they are presented in the interest of open debate and discussion in the community and reflect our themes of: Strengthening our Democracy - Valuing our Diversity - Building our Future. The Hawke Centre reserves the right to change their program at any time without notice.

An Evening with Geetanjali Shree

Event details