Writer, activist and lawyer Banu Mushtaq’s short story collection ‘Heart Lamp’ became the first Kannada title to win the coveted GBP 50,000 International Booker Prize.
Ms Mushtaq began writing about her people, their joys, sorrows and anxieties, over five decades ago. Heart Lamp is a collection of 12 short stories selected from her work written between 1990 and 2023 and translated by Deepa Bhasthi.
It’s a first win for Kannada, and the first time in the history of the prize that a collection of short stories has been honoured, from a shortlist featuring books in French, Italian, Danish, and Japanese. The award for an Indian writer comes three years after Geetanjali Shree won for Tomb of Sand, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell.
Ms. Mushtaq, who hails from Hassan in Karnataka, uses a language that “sings of resilience and nuance” to narrate the everyday lives of Muslim women, moved by their lived experiences of pain and suffering in a patriarchal society, says the jury.
In her translator’s note, Ms. Bhasthi says that Ms. Mushtaq’s career can be summed up in one Kannada word – ‘bandaya’, which means “dissent, rebellion, protest, resistance to authority, revolution and its adjacent ideas.” The Bandaya Sahitya literary movement of the 1970s and 80s, which urged marginalized communities including women and Dalits to tell their stories and fight for their rights, helped Ms. Mushtaq find her voice.