Quest of a lifetime, an evening of elation: 'Like a thousand fireflies lighting the sky'

Banu Mushtaq wrote her first short story when she was in middle school in Karnataka's Hassan town in the 1950s. That journey came full circle on Wednesday as the 77-year-old writer, lawyer and activist scripted history by winning the international Booker Prize along with her translator Deepa Bhasthi, becoming the first Kannada writer to clinch the prestigious award.

- Dhrubo Jyoti

NEW DELHI:

The winning book, Heart Lamp —a collection of 12 short stories written over a period of 30 years that exquisitely captured the everyday lives of Muslim women in Karnataka with wit and poise—beat five other titles from around the world. It is the first short story collection to win the annual prize that honours the best fiction translated into English.

"This moment feels like a thousand fireflies lighting a single sky — brief, brilliant and utterly collective," Mushtaq said at a ceremony at the Tate Modern gallery in London.

"This book is my love letter to the idea that no story is local or small...to write in Kannada is to inherit a legacy of cosmic wonder and earthly wisdom."

Bhashti added, "What a win this is for my beautiful language." She became the first Indian translator to win the International Booker.

This is the second Indian book to win the international Booker Prize in three years after Geetanjali Shree and translator Daisy Rockwell won the 2022 award for Tomb of Sand (Ret Samadhi). The writer and the translator receive 25,000 pounds each.

‘Heart Lamp is something genuinely new for English readers. A radical translation which ruffles language, to create new textures in a plurality of Englishes. These beautiful, busy, life-affirming stories rise from Kannada, interspersed with the extraordinary socio-political richness of other languages and dialects. It speaks of women's lives, reproductive rights, faith, caste, power and oppression," said jury chair Max Porter.

A celebrated name in Karnataka, Mushtaq started writing in the 1970s and blazed a trail with her outspoken advocacy of women's rights and freedoms, attracting a volley of threats, social boycotts, and even surviving a knife attack. Her internal turmoil, often reflected in her protagonists, once brought her on the brink of taking her life in her late 20s as a young mother, but she survived that too.