India’s Banu Mushtaq makes history with International Booker win

Indian writer, lawyer and activist Banu Mushtaq has made history by becoming the first author writing in the Kannada language to win the International Booker prize with her short story anthology, Heart Lamp.

It is the first short story collection to win the presigious prize. Judges praised her characters as “astonishing portraits of survival and resilience”. Featuring 12 short stories written by Mushtaq between 1990 and 2023, Heart Lamp poignantly captures the hardships of Muslim women living in southern India.

The stories were selected and translated into English from Kannada, which is spoken in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, by Deepa Bhasthi who will share the £50,000 prize.
In her acceptance speech, Mushtaq thanked readers for letting her words wander into their hearts.

“This book was born from the belief that no story is ever small; that in the tapestry of human experience, every thread holds the weight of the whole,” she said. “In a world that often tries to divide us, literature remains one of the last sacred spaces where we can live inside each other’s minds, if only for a few pages,” she added.

Bhasthi, who became the first Indian translator to win an International Booker, said that she hoped that the win would encourage more translations from and into Kannada and other South Asian languages.

Manasi Subramaniam, Editor-in-chief of Penguin India, the book’s publisher in India, told the BBC that the award was a significant win for regional literature.

“Following Tomb of Sand’s landmark win in 2022 [Geetanjali Shree’s book was translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell], Heart Lamp’s triumph this year is a powerful reminder that literature in India’s many languages demands our full attention. We owe it our ears,” said Subramaniam

Mushtaq’s body of work is well-known among book lovers, but the Booker International win has shone a bigger spotlight on her life and literary oeuvre, which mirrors many of the challenges the women in her stories face, brought on by religious conservatism and a deeply patriarchal society.

It is this self-awareness that has, perhaps, helped Mushtaq craft some of the most nuanced characters and plotlines. “In a literary culture that rewards spectacle, Heart Lamp insists on the value of attention – to lives lived at the edges, to unnoticed choices, to the strength it takes simply to persist. That is Banu Mushtaq’s quiet power,” a review in the Indian Express newspaper says about the book. (BBC)