Kashmiri novel wins 2025 Armory Square Prize

June 22, 2025 by News Desk

Mehdi Khawaja’s English translation of Akhtar Mohiuddin’s 1975 Kashmiri novel, To Each Their Own Hell, has been awarded the 2025 Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation.

The announcement was made during a livestreamed event co-hosted with Himal Southasian’s annual Fiction Fest.

Juror Daisy Rockwell praised the winning work, saying, “The 1975 Kashmiri novel To Each Their Own Hell by Akhtar Mohiuddin is a taut, compelling meditation on love, and its absence, populated by mysterious characters with names like X and Sheen and Daisy and Nancy. In Mehdi Khawaja’s compelling translation, the propulsive voice of the narrative immediately grabs the reader’s attention and won’t let go. To Each Their Own Hell is utterly unique and evokes both the nihilism of No Exit or Madame Bovary and the ambiance of a noir thriller.”

Mehdi Khawaja is a freelance journalist and editor who has written for Indian and international publications. He has also taught courses on Kashmiri language and literature at Ashoka University and works as a traditional craftsman.

His translation stood out among a shortlist that reflected the rich and varied literary traditions of South Asia, with works set both within the region and in its diasporas, touching on themes of identity, alienation, and transformation.

Among the finalists was Badalta Hua Desh, a Hindi short story collection by Manoj Kumar Pandey, translated by Punarvasu Joshi. Another shortlisted title, Grandmothers, Granddaughters and Other Women by Sinhala author Kumudu Kumarasinghe, was translated by Ciara Mendis. Moumin (The Believer and Other Stories), by Tamil writer Shobasakthi and translated by Sumathy Sivamohan, brought together works written between 1997 and 2024.

The winning entry, To Each Their Own Hell by Akhtar Mohiuddin, was translated from Kashmiri by Mehdi Khawaja. Saigon Puducherry, a 2022 Tamil novel by Nagarathinam Krishna translated by Subhashree Beeman, received a Special Jury Mention.

Jason Grunebaum, the jury chair, said during the event, “This prize exists to bring vital, underrepresented voices into English, and this year’s entries made our work both difficult and deeply rewarding. We are excited to see Khawaja’s translation reach new readers.”

Excerpts from the five shortlisted works will be published by Words Without Borders, and Khawaja’s winning translation will be published by Open Letter Books in 2027.

The Armory Square Prize was launched in 2022 to address stark disparities in global literary translation. Of nearly 7,600 translated books published in the U.S. over the past decade, fewer than one percent originated in South Asian languages—despite being spoken by over 20 percent of the world’s population.

This year’s jury included Deena Chalabi, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Jason Grunebaum, Daisy Rockwell, Pia Sawhney, Arunava Sinha, and Padma Viswanathan. Their deliberations took into account translation quality, the significance of the original work, and the degree of underrepresentation of the language in U.S. publishing.

The prize is sponsored by Armory Square Ventures, a mission-driven venture capital firm based in New York, and the winning entries are published by Open Letter Books, a nonprofit press at the University of Rochester dedicated to literature in translation.