This International 2025 Booker Prize winner is an interesting milestone: the first ever Kannada-language work to win, it’s also actually the first short story collection to win too….which is amazing, as I love short stories, and it’s great to see a collection win a major award!
Enjoyable to read, Banu Mushtaq is clearly a talented writer, but you also feel her activism and her politics come through in her themes. These 12 stories were written between 1990 and 2023 in Kannada, focusing on the area of Karnataka (southern India) and the plight and fates of Muslim women in those communities.
There are some really interesting questions around agency, protest, motherhood, and sexual politics that run through these stories. In a society where there are poorly functioning safety nets for women, what happens when the men in charge shirk their responsibilities? How can women bring their grievances to bear on wider society? Who will listen to them?
The descriptions of abandonment and the ways in which women are put into dead-end situations are heart-breaking, but there are also moments of power, joy, and connection.
Amazing translation from Deepa Bhasthi and I also enjoyed the discussion on the difficulties of translation.
One word: profound.
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