Once Elephants Lived Here (Signed by Geetanjali Shree)

Eleven stories from the winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize — translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell.

The eleven stories in Once Elephants Lived Here cover a wide variety of themes, but all have in common the stylistic experimentalism that came to blossom fully in Tomb of Sand. There is an iconoclasm to Geetanjali Shree's writing, especially beginning with this collection. Readers will soon learn that nothing is sacred to the author.

Narrative and genre conventions are summarily pushed off their pedestals and in their place we find… what? Entirely new ways of conceiving and presenting storytelling unfurl before us as we come to question our own rigid preconceptions of the short-story genre.

In one story, a woman spends all day compulsively walking in circles around her housing complex. There is no introduction, no explanation, no denouement. In another, a woman goes on a writer's retreat, and in a pseudo-sci-fi turn of events, falls passionately in love with the sky — the other participants at the retreat are robotic. In a third, a narrator staying in a cottage in Kerala is overwhelmed with grief over past events but is surprised out of her self-indulgence by a mysterious group of young women.

Plots break, sentences shatter, grammar careens, new words are formed, and narrative structures are erected and felled.

“So no one remembers in this city, no memories of anything, of how there were once villages on both sides of the river, and fields and elephants too, and how across the bridge a sign read ‘ELEPHANTS LIVE HERE’… of all these things there is no memory, not even in the form of tales or rumours.”

About the author & translator

Geetanjali Shree is the winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize, and of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, for her novel Tomb of Sand. She has written five other novels: Mai (Silently Mother), Hamara Shahar Us Baras (Our City That Year), Tirohit (The Roof Beneath Their Feet), Khali Jagah (The Empty Space) and Sah-saa (All at Once), as well as five short-story collections. Known for her innovative use of language and structure, her work has been translated into many Indian and foreign languages.

Daisy Rockwell is an artist, writer and Hindi–Urdu translator living in Vermont. Her work has been awarded the International Booker Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Translation of a Literary Work, the Wisconsin Prize for Poetry in Translation and the Vani Foundation Distinguished Translator Award, among others.

Cover illustration by Harshad Marathe · Cover design by Shadab Khan