Banu Mushtaq, the writer and activist, was awarded the International Booker Prize on Tuesday for her short story collection “Heart Lamp,” the first Kannada-language author to win the prize for translated fiction.
The 77-year-old Mushtaq will share the £50,000 ($67,000, €59,300) prize with her translator Deepa Bhasthi, who also helped with picking the stories featured in the award-winning collection.
This marks the first time that a collection of short stories receives the award. It also makes Bhasthi the first Indian translator to win the prize in its current form, adopted in 2016.
The annual is run alongside the but the latter is handed out in the fall.
Max Porter hails ‘Heart Lamp’
The award ceremony was held at London’s Tate Modern Museum, and announced by bestselling Booker Prize-longlisted author Max Porter, who chairs the five-member voting panel.
Porter hailed “Heart Lamp” as “something genuinely new for English readers.”
“These beautiful, busy, life-affirming stories rise from Kannada, interspersed with the extraordinary socio-political richness of other languages and dialects,” said Porter.
“It speaks of women’s lives, reproductive rights, faith, caste, power and oppression.”
Mushtaq calls her win ‘utterly collective’
During her acceptance speech, Mushtaq described the award as a “great honour,” saying she was receiving it “not as an individual but as a voice raised in chorus with so many others.”
“This moment feels like a thousand fireflies lighting a single sky — brief, brilliant and utterly collective,” she said.
Kannada is spoken by some 65 million people, primarily in southern India.
Mushtaq wrote the short stories featured in the collection between 1990 and 2023. Bhasthi’s curation and translation was keen to preserve the multilingual nature of southern India.
The collection was critically praised for its dry and gentle humor, witty style and commentary on issues such as patriarch, casteism and religious conservatism.
Edited by: Louis Oelofse
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