Banu Mushtaq wins International Booker prize

Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, has won this year's International Booker prize for translated fiction, becoming the first short story collection to take the award.

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The stories were originally written in Kannada, the official language of the state of Karnataka in southern India.

Described by the author and chair of judges Max Porter as “something genuinely new for English readers: a radical translation” of “beautiful, busy, life-affirming stories”, Heart Lamp’s 12 tales chronicle the lives of women in patriarchal communities in southern India. They were selected as well as translated by Bhasthi, the first Indian translator to win the award. She chose them from around 50 stories in six collections written by Mushtaq over a 30-year-period.

Receiving the award, Mushtaq said the win marks “more than a personal achievement. It is an affirmation that we as individuals and as a global community can thrive when we embrace diversity, celebrate our differences and uplift one another.”

“In a world that often tries to divide us, literature remains one of the lost sacred spaces where we can live inside each other’s minds,” she added.