Author Geetanjali Shree and her translator, Daisy Rockwell, won the international booker award for Shree’s third novel, Tomb of Sand. This is the first time a Hindi novel has even been nominated for the prize, and the first time a book originally written in any Indian language has won.

In Tomb of Sand, Shree tells the story of an old woman called “Ma” who travels to Pakistan after the death of her husband, confronting her grief along with trauma from her past as a teenager during the partition of India and Pakistan.

When Britain’s parliament passed the Indian Independence Act in 1947, it ordered that India and Pakistan, which had been integrated as British India under colonial rule, be formally demarcated into separate countries within a month. Boundary commissions attempted to draw border lines so the maximum number of Muslims would be in Pakistan and the maximum number of Hindus would be in India.

When Britain’s parliament passed the Indian Independence Act in 1947, it ordered that India and Pakistan, which had been integrated as British India under colonial rule, be formally demarcated into separate countries within a month. Boundary commissions attempted to draw border lines so the maximum number of Muslims would be in Pakistan and the maximum number of Hindus would be in India.

Chaos ensued after the new borders were announced. Muslims within Indian boundary lines left their homes and fled to Pakistan, and Hindus in the area now designated as Pakistan did the reverse. An estimated 14 million people abandoned their homes, and somewhere between 200,000 and 2 million people were killed in the ensuing madness.

Despite the heavy subject, Shree took a light-hearted approach. Frank Wynne, chair of judges for this year’s prize, tells the Guardian’s Sarah Shaffi the book is “extraordinarily funny and fun” and a “charming…perfectly decent beach read for absolutely everyone,” He that despite a “passionate debate” among the judges about the other books, Shree’s novel ultimately “was overwhelmingly the book chosen by the judges.”