‘Heart Lamp’ wins International Booker, with stories of India’s Muslim women and girls

The writer and advocate Banu Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi have won this year’s International Booker Prize for their book Heart Lamp. The book is the first short story collection to win the prize, which awards the best fiction translated into English.

“Heart Lamp is something genuinely new for English readers,” wrote Max Porter, chair of the judges, in a statement announcing the win. “It speaks of women’s lives, reproductive rights, faith, caste, power and oppression.”

The book collects 12 short stories written by Mushtaq between 1990 and 2023. They tell the stories of girls and women in Muslim communities in southern India navigating caste and class. In one story, a woman is jealous of the relationship between her husband and his mother. In another, a woman deals with her son’s painful circumcision.

Mushtaq, a lawyer and advocate for women’s rights, wrote in a statement that the stories were inspired by daily incidents that happened to women all around her. “I witness [this] day to day, in my daily life, because so many women come to me. They have brought all the problems with them. They seek relief. But some of the women, they don’t know why they are suffering.”

Heart Lamp is the first prize winner to be translated from Kannada, a language spoken mostly in southern India. In an interview with Scroll.in, translator Deepa Bhasthi explained that her approach to translation isn’t to turn the language into “proper” English. Instead, “the aim is to introduce the reader to new words, in this case, Kannada or to new thoughts that come loaded with the hum of another language. I call it translating with an accent,” she said. “So the English in Heart Lamp is an English with a very deliberate Kannada hum to it.”

The judges for this year’s prize had to whittle the list down from 154 books submitted by publishers. The prize comes with £50,000 (about $66,000), split equally between the author and translator.

Other books that were shortlisted for the prize include On the Calculation of Volume I,  Small Boat, Under the Eye of the Big Bird, Perfection and A Leopard-Skin Hat.

The book Kairos won last year’s International Booker Prize.