New Delhi, Oct. 30 -- From the seasoned pen of Daisy Rockwell-after winning the International Booker Prize in 2022 for her translation of Geetanjali Shree's Ret Samadhi, now the best-known translator in the Anglophone world of Hindi and Urdu novels-comes a new book that also attests to a change in her own circumstances. Rockwell is seen now asserting a translator's power, rarely ceded by the market, for literary advocacy and restitution.

The Pashtun novelist Nisar Aziz Butt (1927-2020), a mathematics teacher who spent most of her life in obscurity even within her native milieu of Urdu letters, published Nagari Nagari Phira Musafir in 1955 when she was only 29. Yet like her teenaged heroine, Afgar, Butt was clearly an old soul. From the f...