Banu Mushtaq calls Booker win historic moment

Author and activist Banu Mushtaq, who made history when her short story collection ‘Heart Lamp’ became the first Kannada literary work to win the International Booker Prize this week, has described her victory as a “historical occasion” for literature in the classical Dravidian language.

In an interview with PTI hours after lifting the trophy at a glittering awards ceremony in London on Tuesday night, Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi expressed their sheer joy at the global recognition for Kannada literature, which goes back hundreds of years.

“It’s a historic occasion for Kannada literature because till now there was no such huge global recognition for our literature,” said Mushtaq.

“Though Kannada has got a lot of potentiality, a lot of literature is out there, but it has not been exposed to the global arena and not been recognised,” she said.

Bhasthi expressed the hope that the big win for ‘Heart Lamp’ would lead to many more translations, making the rich literature available to a much wider global audience.

“I'm very excited to see a lot more translations from Kannada because we have incredible literature that goes back to at least 1,500 years. I hope there are far more works from Kannada which are translated into English,” she said.

The tales in ‘Heart Lamp’, the first collection of short stories to win the prestigious GBP 50,000 literary prize shared between author and translator, were written by Mushtaq over a period of over 30 years between 1990 and 2023. They were selected and curated by Bhasthi, who was keen to preserve the multilingual nature of southern India.

Asked about the timeless quality of these tales that resonated with the Booker judges, Mushtaq pointed to the great classics that impact people’s imaginations over hundreds of years.

“The great literature we are reading even today is about 200-300 years old, or even 500 years. It stands the test of the time and is relevant even today. Thirty years is nothing,” she said.

Bhasthi noted: “I say this very often, and I think about this very often, that even though the stories were written over 30 years, the underlying theme in pretty much every single one of the stories is the way women live and love and laugh and dissent and manage the pressures of patriarchy.

“So in that sense, not much has changed. I mean, patriarchy has been trying to tame women back then, and it is still trying to tame women to this day. It is this underlying theme in the stories that gives a certain timelessness to the stories in ‘Heart Lamp’.” In her acceptance speech, Mushtaq described literature as a sacred space where “we can live inside each other's minds, if only for a few pages”.

Asked to elaborate on how she would like her writings to live in readers’ minds, she added: “In certain passages I have created, when you are fully engrossed, is when I have entered your mind and heart. You have given your mind and heart to my work.

“Thereby, we exchange our views, we hold a sacred dialogue with each other.” The International Booker Prize is an annual literary award that celebrates the best works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between May 2024 and April 2025.

Shortlisted among six worldwide titles, Mushtaq’s work appealed to the 2025 judges' panel for its “witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating” style of capturing portraits of family and community tensions.