24 h. ago ‘My legal work sows the seeds of my stories’: International Booker prize winner Banu Mushtaq

The author and activist, who was subject to a fatwa in 2000, has won the prestigious prize for translated fiction for her short stories about the lives of Muslim women. She and her translator Deepa Bhasthi explain how Heart Lamp’s themes ‘are universal’• ‘Radical translation’ of Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq wins International Booker prize‘Human beings and their basic nature are the same everywhere,” Banu Mushtaq says. “That is the intention of my writing. The theme is woman, the theme is marginalised people, the theme is to be a voice to the voiceless community.”Mushtaq, from the Karnataka region of southern India, has been “awake all night”, she says, as we speak on the morning after she won the International Booker prize in London for her book Heart Lamp. The prize is shared between Mushtaq and her translator Deepa Bhasthi, who is also present – and also had no sleep. Continue reading...

Politics

3 d. ago Watch the moment Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp wins Booker Prize

Audience members rejoiced as Banu Mushtaq's Heart Lamp was announced as the winner of the International Booker Prize 2025 on Tuesday, 20 May.

Politics

3 d. ago International Booker Prize 2025: Banu Mushtaq wins for book ‘challenging Western stereotypes about Muslim life’

The 12 short stories, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, follow the lives of ordinary women living in southern India

Politics

3 d. ago Indian author Banu Mushtaq wins International Booker Prize with short story collection

Indian author Banu Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi have won the International Booker Prize for fiction for “Heart Lamp,” a collection of 12 short stories written over a period of more than 30 years, chronicling the everyday lives and struggles of women in southern India

Culture

3 d. ago ‘Radical translation’ of Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq wins International Booker prize

Translator Deepa Bhasthi’s pick of 12 of Mushtaq’s ‘life-affirming’ tales about women’s lives in southern India becomes the first short story collection to win the £50,000 awardHeart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, has won this year’s International Booker prize for translated fiction, becoming the first short story collection to take the award. The stories were originally written in Kannada, the official language of the state of Karnataka in southern India.Described by the author and chair of judges Max Porter as “something genuinely new for English readers: a radical translation” of “beautiful, busy, life-affirming stories”, Heart Lamp’s 12 tales chronicle the lives of women in patriarchal communities in southern India. They were selected as well as translated by Bhasthi, the first Indian translator to win the award. She chose them from around 50 stories in six collections written by Mushtaq over a 30-year-period. Continue reading...

Politics

3 w. ago Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata review – a future without sex

The Convenience Store Woman author imagines the creep of a new worldview, in a novel that highlights the weirdness of normal lifeIn Japanese writer Sayaka Murata’s fiction, characters do perverse things in order to “play the part of the fictitious creature called ‘an ordinary person’”. This description comes from Keiko, the 36-year-old narrator of Convenience Store Woman. Keiko’s conformist family and friends can’t believe she can be happy being single and working a dead-end job at a convenience store. Keiko finds an unexpected way to make it look as though she is normal: she keeps a man in her bathtub, hoping that everyone will simply assume they are a couple. A similar idea appears in Murata’s short story Poochie, from the collection Life Ceremony. A young girl takes a friend to a shed in the mountains to meet her pet; the friend is surprised to discover that the pet is a middle-aged man. Murata is interested in the lengths humans will go to in order to domesticate ...

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