‘A Hell of Our Own’: Armory Square Prize goes to Mehdi Khawaja for translation of Kashmiri novel
In Mehdi Khawaja’s gripping translation of Akhtar Mohiuddin’s 1975 Kashmiri novel 'To Each Their Own Hell', a landscape of longing, mystery, and existential dread finds new voice, earning it the 2025 Armory Square Prize for Translation.
3 min readNew DelhiUpdated: Jul 11, 2025 05:09 PM IST
Winner Mehdi Khawaja, a freelance journalist and editor with a background in Kashmiri crafts and pedagogy, was recognised at a June 16 ceremony. (armorysv.com)
Writer Mehdi Khawaja has won the 2025 Armory Square Prize for Translation for To Each Their Own Hell, his rendering of Akhtar Mohiuddin’s searing 1975 Kashmiri novel into English. The novel, described by juror Daisy Rockwell (recipient of The International Booker Prize) as “a taut, compelling meditation on love, and its absence,” captivated judges with its noir edge, existential themes, and hypnotic narrative voice.
Khawaja, a freelance journalist and editor with a background in Kashmiri crafts and pedagogy, was recognised at a June 16 ceremony co-hosted with Himal Southasian’s annual Fiction Fest. The event featured readings from all five finalists, remarks from jury chair Jason Grunebaum and Armory Square Ventures cofounder Pia Sawhney, and culminated in the live announcement of the winner.
Set against a landscape of psychological unease and philosophical despair, Mohiuddin’s To Each Their Own Hell offers a rare window into the literary psyche of 20th-century Kashmir. The novel’s translation, Rockwell noted, is “utterly unique” and evokes the “nihilism of No Exit or Madame Bovary,” while conjuring “the ambiance of a noir thriller.” Its cast hovers on the border of allegory and flesh.
Khawaja was chosen from a diverse shortlist that included works translated from Hindi, Sinhala, and Tamil. The jury also awarded a Special Jury Mention to Saigon Puducherry, translated from Tamil by Subhashree Beeman.
Badalta Hua Desh by Manoj Kumar Pandey (Hindi), translated by Punarvasu Joshi
Grandmothers, Granddaughters and Other Women by Kumudu Kumarasinghe (Sinhala), translated by Ciara Mendis
Moumin (or The Believer and Other Stories) by Shobasakthi (Tamil), translated by Sumathy Sivamohan
Excerpts from the shortlisted works will appear on Words Without Borders, an online platform for world literature in translation. The winning book will be published by Open Letter Books in 2027. Last year’s winning translation, Fortress of the Forgotten Ones by Pakistani author Fahmida Riaz and translated from the Urdu by Sana Chaudhry, is set to be published by Open Letter Books later this year.
What is the Armory Square Prize
The Armory Square Prize focuses exclusively on literary translations from South Asian languages. It was launched in 2022 to address a perceived imbalance in the global literary landscape. Its creators note: “Of the 7,600 books translated into English and published in the United States over the last decade, fewer than 1% were originally written in South Asian languages, despite those languages being spoken by nearly 20% of the world’s population.”
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The submissions are evaluated on linguistic nuance, literary merit, and the degree of underrepresentation in the Anglophone market.
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