On (Mis)Translation and the Vein of Resistance

Daisy Rockwell

PTIC, Spring 2024 Translator In Residence

Daisy Rockwell is an artist and literary translator living in Vermont. She translates from Hindi and Urdu into English with a focus on women's writing. Her translation of the Hindi novel Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree was the winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize and the 2022 Warwick Women's Prize in Translation. In 2019, she was awarded the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for the Translation of a Literary Work for her translation of Krishna Sobti's A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There. In 2023 she was awarded the Vani Foundation's Distinguished Translator Award. She holds a PhD in South Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago.

Khairani Barokka

Khairani Barokka is a writer, translator, editor, and artist from Jakarta, based in London, with over two decades of professional translation experience. She holds a PhD by Practice in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London, and was a Research Fellow at University of the Arts London. In 2023, Okka was shortlisted for the Asian Women of Achievement Awards, and longlisted for the Loewe/Studio Voltaire Awards. Okka’s work has been presented widely internationally, and centres disability justice as anticolonial praxis, and access as translation. Among her honours, she has been a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change, a Delfina Foundation Associate Artist, an Artforum Must-See, and Associate Artist at the UK’s National Centre for Writing. She was the first Poet-in-Residence at Modern Poetry in Translation, and later became the magazine’s first non-British Editor, introducing numerous languages to its pages for the first time.

Okka’s books include Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis), Rope (Nine Arches), and Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (as co-editor; Nine Arches). Her latest books are Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches), shortlisted for the 2022 Barbellion Prize, and 2024's amuk (Nine Arches). Okka's speculative nonfiction debut, Annah, Infinite, is a translation of a painting from a disability justice perspective, forthcoming from Tilted Axis Press in June 2025.