22-05-2025
Kannada writer Mushtaq makes history with Booker win
Author of six short-story collections, a novel, an essay collection and a poetry collection, Mushtaq writes in Kannada and has won major awards for her literary works, including the Karnataka Sahitya Academy and the Daana Chintamani Attimabbe awards
Bengaluru/London: Kannada 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.
