"literature remains one of the last sacred spaces"
Indian writer, lawyer and activist Banu Mushtaq has become the first Kannada author to win the International Booker Prize.
Her short story collection, Heart Lamp, is also the first anthology to win the award. Judges praised her characters as “astonishing portraits of survival and resilience”.
Translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi, the book features 12 stories written between 1990 and 2023.
Together, they paint a vivid picture of the hardships faced by Muslim women in southern India.
Mushtaq and Bhasthi will share the £50,000 prize.
In her acceptance speech, Mushtaq thanked readers for allowing her stories to reach them.
She said: “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.
“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.”
Bhasthi, the first Indian translator to win the prize, said she hoped the award would lead to more translations from Kannada and other South Asian languages.
Banu Mushtaq’s win follows Geetanjali Shree’s 2022 Booker International victory for Tomb of Sand, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell.
While Mushtaq’s work has long been admired by Kannada readers, the prize has introduced her to a wider global audience.
Her fiction draws heavily from personal experience and explores the impact of gender and religious conservatism in Indian society.
Born in a small town in Karnataka, Banu Mushtaq grew up in a Muslim neighbourhood and initially studied the Quran in Urdu.
Her father, a government employee, enrolled her in a convent school where classes were taught in Kannada. Though the language was unfamiliar, she mastered it and chose it for her literary expression.
Mushtaq began writing as a schoolgirl and continued her education even as many of her peers married young. She got married at 26, but her early married life was marked by conflict and isolation.
In an interview with Vogue magazine, she said:
“I had always wanted to write but had nothing to write (about) because suddenly, after a love marriage, I was told to wear a burqa and dedicate myself to domestic work.
“I became a mother suffering from postpartum depression at 29.”
In a separate interview with The Week, she recalled a moment of desperation.
“Once, in a fit of despair, I poured white petrol on myself, intending to set myself on fire. Thankfully, he [her husband] sensed it in time, hugged me, and took away the matchbox.
“He pleaded with me, placing our baby at my feet saying, ‘Don’t abandon us’.”
This personal pain shaped her storytelling. Her characters are not silent sufferers but women who endure and, at times, resist.
Banu Mushtaq later worked as a journalist at a leading Kannada tabloid and was active in the Bandaya movement, which tackled social and economic injustice through literature.
After a decade in journalism, she became a lawyer to support her family.
Over the years, Mushtaq has published six short story collections, a novel and an essay collection. Her translated anthology Haseena and Other Stories won the PEN Translation Prize in 2024.
Her bold writing has often attracted hostility.
In 2000, after publicly supporting Muslim women’s right to pray in mosques, she received threats and was targeted with a fatwa.
In an interview with The Hindu, she revealed that a man tried to attack her with a knife before her husband intervened.
But Mushtaq did not stop speaking out:
“I have consistently challenged chauvinistic religious interpretations.”
“These issues are central to my writing even now. Society has changed a lot, but the core issues remain the same.
“Even though the context evolves, the basic struggles of women and marginalised communities continue.”
Her writing has earned her several literary honours, including the Karnataka Sahitya Academy Award and the Daana Chintamani Attimabbe Award.
Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp is a landmark for Kannada literature and a defiant voice for women whose lives are rarely centred in Indian fiction. In telling their stories, she has written her own into history.
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