Interview: Int'l Booker Winner Banu Mushtaq Gives Voice To Silenced Women

Celebrated Kannada author Banu Mushtaq's book Heart Lamp (translated by Deepa Bhasthi) has won the International Booker Prize. In an interview with SheThePeople, she recounted her journey as a writer and shared what inspired the book.

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Tanya Savkoor
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Image: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Anadolu via Getty Images

Banu Mushtaq, a renowned writer from Hassan, Karnataka, has won the International Booker Prize for her book Heart Lamp, translated by Deepa Bhasthi. She is the only Kannada-language author to win the coveted literature prize. Receiving the prize at London's Tate Modern gallery, she quoted one of her own works: “This moment feels like a thousand fireflies lighting a single sky -- brief, brilliant and utterly collective. I accept this great honour not as an individual but as a voice raised in chorus with so many others."

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Spanning two decades of writing, Heart Lamp is a collection of 12 short fiction stories that trace the lives of people from Muslim communities of southern India. The International Booker Prize committee described, "Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it’s in her characters that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature." Mushtaq also won the Karnataka Sahitya Academy Award in 1999 and the

International Booker Prize