“For me, literature is not about representing life, or replicating life, or imitating life. Literature is life,” says Geetanjali Shree, whose novel Tomb of Sand (translated by Daisy Rockwell) won the 2022 International Booker Prize, the first book written in any of India’s languages to do so.

Shree, who grew up in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, writes in Hindi. She’s also fluent in English, and the decision to write in Hindi—entangled as it is in questions of India’s colonial history and Partition—is one she’s written and spoken about at length.

“My Hindi is better,” Shree tells Kirkus. “It works on many registers: at a personal level, at the street level, and reading and writing.”

Shree’s prose is remarkably expansive, stuffed with references to movies, songs, literature, and forays into other languages. Rahul Soni, who’s translated Shree’s work into English, once told an interviewer that his biggest challenge was conveying the sense of “playfulness” in her Hindi. “There is a music to her sentences that does not come easily to ‘standard’ English,” he said.

Since winning the Booker, Shree says she’s been asked many times about her creative process—and the questions, she adds, have prompted her to actually consider her methods. “I’m noticing certain things,” she says. For one: “Drama is not something I’m really after.”

Shree says she finds inspiration in the “whispers, and murmurs, and echoes, and almost hidden places” where we do our most mundane “living out of life”—the home, say, or even just the kitchen, rather than the war room. And while the characters who fill those spaces might at first glance appear to acquiesce to the powers that be, “little, little things are happening” below the surface, Shree says. “Call it rebellion.”

All this is certainly true of her latest book in English, The Roof Beneath Their Feet, translated by Soni and published last fall by the U.K.-based independent press And Other Stories. The novel explores a relationship between two women of different social classes and the many assumptions—usually incorrect—made by their neighbors because of their class. “This is the story of the entire world now,” Shree says. “It’s over-politicized and over-loud, and the outside is impinging so much on the inside.” In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus called the novel “[i]ntricate, subtle, nuanced, perceptive, rewarding.”

While she herself might feel the need to escape, to “go in some other direction,” Shree says she knows “there’s no getting away from the outside. The outside will find its way in somehow.”

Recently, Shree took time away from a Berlin-based fellowship for a wide-ranging interview in English on WhatsApp. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Could you tell us about your interest in focusing not only on the lives of women but on the home as a worthy subject of fiction?

Home is a microcosm for all the big things happening outside, and everything plays itself out in the characters in the home, in the daily events of the home. I don’t have to go and touch on some big politics somewhere out there—some big, dramatic moment out there—because it comes into our most personal lives as well. That is where, for me, the most wonderful stories come from.

Once, in the course of talking [to someone], we hit upon [the idea] that my writing is a bit like touching on the ordinary, enjoying the ordinary. And there’s a little prick—like acupuncture—that hardly hurts, but it actually activates things all around the pinprick. And it’s either going to be healing or it’s going to make you wake up. I’m happy if my writing does something like that.

You said earlier that “literature is life.” I noted a passage from this novel that reads, “The life that is, is unreal—the life that will or might be is real!” I wanted to ask if that quote speaks to the power and the wonder of narrative possibility—the alternatives that storytelling offers us by allowing us to enter into other lives.

I think you’re very much on the right track. And I think perhaps it says something about literature and perhaps all writers: We wouldn’t be writing if we had given up completely. I mean, the life that is is also full of lots of things that may be very despairing and may be very wrong. And if we thought that was it—and that’s where we close it—then it’s all over. So I think it’s necessary to have that second part of the belief, or faith, that there can be, or there might be, and there is still something that is possible. I think that’s what keeps a writer going, and that’s what makes literature so positive—that even when you’re describing a world falling apart, the very fact that you’re describing it is because you feel it can be put together again. Or you want to believe, and therefore you know you will do something, or you are impelling the person in front of you to do something, to put everything together again.

Do you think that makes the act of description itself an act of hope?

Yes, definitely. I mean, you wouldn’t waste your time describing [things] if it wasn’t—you’d be empty otherwise. Look at writers—or not just writers, I don’t want to just single out writers for this, people—when we’re thinking about these things, when we’re thinking about what’s going wrong and describing it to ourselves, to others, or in whatever ways we express ourselves, when we’re doing that we’re obviously doing it to know something that we can either dismantle or rearrange somehow. So it’s an ongoing attempt, to put it simply, in setting things right—which is not going to happen in a hurry, but we haven’t given up. We still have belief that something is possible.

How do you conceive of your own role as a writer? For you, is that a role imbued with responsibility, or is it more one of creative freedom?

I can start by saying what I’ve not seen myself as: I’m not somebody who’s a political activist or a social reformer. My writing is not geared to a particular purpose—social purpose or political purpose—in that sense. And I don’t have an agenda of that kind when I’m writing. I will say again that for me, my writing is life. I’m expressing life. I’m expressing my living.

I don’t have any slogan about literature of the kind where one can say that you read and you come out changed. Because literature is something that is slow, and the world is fast, life is fast. The time of literature is different from the time of our immediate life. Literature belongs to a much larger span. At best, I can say that literature teaches you to be reflective, to meditate, to be quiet, to listen to others—things like that. I’m not sitting and thinking of reforming the reader, but there is some kind of deep, not fully defined desire to make sense of all the chaos inside me and around me.

Natalia Holtzman is a writer and editor in Ann Arbor, Michigan.