A collection of stories about Indian Muslim women’s daily struggles with bothersome husbands, mothers and religious leaders, on Tuesday won this year’s International Booker Prize, the major award for fiction translated into English.
Banu Mushtaq’s “Heart Lamp,” translated from the original Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, is the first story collection to win the prestigious award. The prize comes with 50,000 pounds, or about $66,700, which the author and translator will split equally.
Established in 2005, the International Booker Prize was originally awarded to an author for their entire body of work and Alice Munro, the short-story writer, was an early recipient. But since 2016, it has been given to a single book translated into English and published in Britain or Ireland during the previous 12 months and no collection had won until Tuesday.
Max Porter, an author and the chair of this year’s judges, said in a news conference that “Heart Lamp” contained “extraordinary accounts of patriarchal systems and resistance,” while the way Bhasthi had translated the collection was unique.
Most translations aim to be “invisible” so that readers wouldn’t know the book wasn’t originally written in English, Porter said. But, he added, Bhasthi’s translation was the opposite, and “Heart Lamp” was filled with Indian expressions and ways of talking that gave its 12 stories “an extraordinary vibrancy.”
“A lot of English readers will find it unlike anything they’ve ever read before,” Porter said.
“Heart Lamp” beat five other shortlisted titles, including Solvej Balle’s “On the Calculation of Volume: 1,” translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland, about an antiquarian bookseller who relives the same day over and over, and Vincenzo Latronico’s “Perfection,” translated from the Italian by Sophie Hughes, which follows an expatriate couple in hip Berlin.
In contrast to those novels, which many reviewers in both Britain and the United States had praised, “Heart Lamp” had received little media attention before Tuesday’s announcement. Only one major daily British newspaper had given the collection a dedicated review, with Lucy Popescu in The Financial Times writing that Mushtaq’s “deceptively simple tales decry the subjugation of women while celebrating their resilience.”
Kate McLoughlin, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, said Mushtaq’s stories were “searing, phantasmagorical, unclassifiable.”
In the collection’s title story, a woman visits her family to plead with them to let her leave her adulterous husband. After they dismiss her concerns, the woman considers suicide. In another story, “Black Cobras,” a woman pleads with a religious leader to make her husband pay their child’s medical bills, and he ignores her request.
Mushtaq, 77, said in a recent interview for the Booker Prize’s website that her stories were “about women — how religion, society and politics demand unquestioning obedience from them, and in doing so, inflict inhumane cruelty upon them, turning them into subordinates.”
Having worked as a lawyer, journalist and activist, Mushtaq said in the interview that her stories were inspired by both news reports and women that she’d met while working. She said she didn’t do extra research. “My heart itself is my field of study,” Mushtaq said: “The more intensely the incidence affects me, the more deeply and emotionally I write.”
Max Porter, the chair of the judges, said the 12 stories were far from simple depictions of oppressed Muslim women. Mushtaq’s stories contained bravery, wit and satire, Porter said, adding: “They’ll challenge Western stereotypes of Muslim life in the most beautiful and exciting way.”
Alex Marshall is a Times reporter covering European culture. He is based in London.
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