Indian writer Banu Mushtaq and translator Dipa Bastji won the International Booker Prize for Literature for their short story collection “Heart Lamp.” The winning book brings together 12 stories written over more than 30 years and depicts the everyday lives and struggles of women from southern India.
The award winners were announced by the famous writer and former Booker Prize finalist Max Porter, president of the five-member jury, at a ceremony held at the Tate Modern gallery in London.
This is the first time the award has been given to a collection of short stories. Dipa Bastji is the first translator from India and the ninth woman overall to win the prestigious award since it was introduced in 2016, and Banu Mushtaq is only the sixth writer to win the award since then.
The winning work is written in Kannada, a language spoken by about 65 million people, mostly in southern India. Porter praised the “radical nature of the translation” and added: “It was a pleasure to hear the jury members increasingly recognize the layers and beauty of these stories. These beautiful, lifelike, powerfully affirmative stories grow out of the Kannada language, imbued with the extraordinary socio-political richness of other languages and dialects. They speak about women’s lives, reproductive rights, religion, the caste system, power and oppression.”
The book, which beat five other works in the finals, includes stories written between 1990 and 2023. They were carefully selected and edited by Bastji, striving to preserve the multilingual nature of southern India.
Banu Mushtak, who, in addition to literature, is involved in law and activism, stated at the book's promotion in London that her stories speak "about women - about how religion, society and politics demand blind obedience from them and thus perpetrate inhuman violence against them, reducing them to mere subservience."
The prize money of 50.000 pounds (about $66.000) is divided equally between the author and the translator, and both receive a statuette.
The International Booker Prize is awarded annually, in parallel with the main Booker Prize for prose in the English language, which will be awarded in the autumn.
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