A collection of stories on the daily Indian difficulties of Muslim women with annoying husbands, mothers and religious leaders, won this year’s international Booker Prize on Tuesday, the major fiction prize translated into English.
“Heart Lamp” by Banu Mushtaq, translated from the original Kannada by Deepa Bhashi, is the first collection of stories to win the prestigious prize. The price is delivered with 50,000 pounds, around $ 66,700, which the author and the translator will also divide.
Created in 2005, the Booker International Prize was initially awarded to an author for all his work and Alice Munro, the short -term writer, was a first recipient. But since 2016, it has been given to a single book translated into English and published in Great Britain or Ireland in the previous 12 months, and no collection had won before Tuesday.
Max Porter, author and president of the judges of this year, said in a press conference that “heart lamp” contained “extraordinary stories of patriarchal systems and resistance”, while the way Bhasthi had translated the collection was unique.
Most translations aim to be “invisible” so that readers do not know that the book was not originally written in English, said Porter. But, he added, Bhasthi’s translation was the opposite, and “Heart Lamp” was filled with Indian expressions and ways of speaking that gave his 12 stories “an extraordinary dynamism”.
“Many English readers will find him different from everything they have ever read before,” said Porter.
“Heart Lamp” beat five other preselected titles, including “On The Calve of Volume: 1” by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish of Barbara J. Haveland, about an antique bookseller who revives the same day again and again, and Vincenzo Latroncoo of “Perfection”, translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes, who follows an expatriate couple in Berlin.
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