A New Direction for Literature: An Interview with Deepa Bhasthi and Banu Mushtaq

In June 2025, Wasafiri Deputy Editor and writer, Vamika Sinha, spoke with 2025 International Booker Prize winners Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi (Wasafiri's inaugural International Translator in Residence) at a live event at Waterstones Islington, London. 

In a wide-ranging conversation, they explored what went into writing, compiling, and producing their winning collection, Heart Lamp. They further discussed championing Indian Muslim writing, different kinds of Englishes and Kannadas, translation as creative practice, the short story form, and more. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Watch the full event recording on our YouTube channel here.

Vamika Sinha: Heart Lamp winning the 2025 International Booker Prize is a historic moment for multiple reasons: it's the first short story collection to win the prize and the first win for the Kannada language. And Deepa, you're the first Indian translator – indeed, the first translator of colour – to win the prize. How has the reception felt for both of you, both at home in India and elsewhere around the world?  

Banu Mushtaq: Since February 2025, when Heart Lamp was longlisted for the International Booker, I’ve been giving four to five interviews each day. It's not an ordinary thing. When we returned to our native place following the prize ceremony in May, people were fighting among themselves to felicitate the win! Our state government organised a massive reception at the airport, which was attended by folk artists, Class 1 officers, and cultural ministers. The government also arranged a function ... where prize money was awarded to both of us. We have pending invitations to date, many of them from places as far and wide as Ubud in Bali, New York, and Sri Lanka. There’s a team working on just sorting through all our upcoming festival visits and celebrations that will take place around the world. 

Deepa Bhasthi: On the personal front, it is, of course, fabulous to be recognised at the government level or by a cultural institution. But what I’m most excited about is an understanding among general readers that this is a big deal for literature from the subcontinent. There is an attention to the kind of English that is in this book versus an English that is popular in translation elsewhere. The media storm will die down in some time and we will go back to our lives. Until then, I hope to keep having this conversation in rooms like this one and in what I translate next — about the kind of Englishes we use back home and the kind of Englishes that are changing. I’m excited that the book is being discussed on the terms of its translation and its importance, because that takes things beyond this being a cultural moment towards being a new direction for literature itself.  

VS: It is indeed exciting. The stories in Heart Lamp span over thirty years of your life, Banu, and during this time you have also been an activist and lawyer. What first drew you to writing fiction, and to the short story form, in particular?  

BM: I have written novels, published a poetry collection, translated works from Urdu to Kannada, and also translated law texts. Over this time, I published sixty-plus short stories over six collections — and it was from those stories that Deepa selected twelve, which came out in the form of Heart Lamp.  

I am fond of the short story format because the canvas is very small. Being an activist and a lawyer means that I need to attend to other priorities as well, and I deviate a lot from writing. This is why I find it very easy to concentrate on short stories. I can do one within a week, or fifteen days, or even a month; whereas a novel requires a lot of time, which I don’t have. The short story demands a lot of creativity to fill the gaps: to create a story and its characters, make a plan, think of a climax and anti-climax, and then sum it up in such a small space ... But that’s the satisfaction I get from writing the short story.   

VS: Deepa, in selecting and curating these stories, you also acted in a kind of editorial capacity. What was your point of entry into Banu's work — and how did that evolve to the point where you put this collection together?  

DB: Whenever I pick up a translation project that I'm potentially interested in, I try and read as much of the author's other works as possible. It helps me understand how they think, how they process language, how they like to talk about things.  

I did read all of Banu’s published stories and put a lot of thought into making Heart Lamp. I noticed the recurrence of certain themes, which is natural for any writer working over a long period of time, even as they treat those themes very differently. I wanted to select stories that displayed a variety of such themes, while also feeling different in how they looked at women characters — the way they are shaped, or how they deal with their lives.  

First and foremost, I chose stories that I enjoyed reading the most. Then came considerations of how language played out in each of them. And if you notice, the women characters are young girls, new mothers, new wives, and older women — the collection traces the life cycle of a woman in all the roles she plays. At the heart of each story might be the idea of a woman trying to live life to the best of her ability under patriarchy or religious oppression, but they are all treated in very different ways. I didn't want to translate multiple stories talking about the oppressed wife, for instance, not because they aren’t oppressed – each story is important, of course – but if I curated the collection that way, it wouldn’t have displayed a broader range of characters.  

Apart from these two main considerations, I chose Heart Lamp’s earlier stories from Banu’s first collection and the last two stories from her sixth collection to reflect a career-spanning survey of the works.  

VS: And what was the translation process like? Was there a lot of back and forth between you both … were there moments of friction, or uncertainty, too?  

DB: I'm not a full-time translator; it’s not the entirety of my writing practice. I do my own work most of the time, which is why Heart Lamp took about three years to complete. I’d probably do a week of very intense translation, keep it aside for a month or two, return to it, and so forth. So, I was very grateful that it was a hands-off translation process. I spoke with Banu whenever I wanted more of a backstory, or needed some clarification on the languages she was using ... but it wasn’t that I’d translate a sentence and show it to her. I greatly appreciated the trust we shared about treating these works.  

VS: I want to bring in your translator's note, Deepa, titled ‘Against Italics’. In it, you explain some of your choices to retain a specific texture and rhythm that you feel acknowledge multiple iterations of different languages — from different kinds of Kannada to different Englishes, Urdu, Malayalam, and Arabic.  

I’m curious to know more about that choice in the context of moments of heightened lyricism in the stories, in places where the text nearly tips into poetry. For instance, in the story ‘Black Cobras’, there is one sentence I adore: ‘After laying the egg of light at dawn, the black hen of ignorance exited, rushing into the darkness to peck at grains and sticks.’ What is it like to translate these moments, when in each language the imagery and cultural references have unique evocations? What are the challenges here, and how do you approach them?  

DB: That is my favourite line because I hated translating it! It was really tough because it wasn’t a familiar image or phrase that I had come across in Kannada literature before. It took me a while to visualise it, to imagine this hen. I spent more time on it than on some other sentences.

These moments can throw you off, but that’s also where I see translation as much of a creative process as writing itself, and in fact prefer the term ‘writer-translator’ instead of ‘writer’ and ‘translator’. It’s about having an ear for language and about playing with both Kannada and English. You imagine a word, a picture, and then you translate this word-picture into a different language, while making it sound as poetic or lyrical as possible.  

VS: Banu, this prize amplifies Muslim voices and stories in India at a time where marginalised populations are struggling to be heard amid Hindu majoritarianism. I imagine much of what you witness in your work as a lawyer and an activist likely filters into your stories. What do you hope this win means for other Muslim writers in India in terms of publishing, both within the country and outside?  

BM: I think more people are reading stories by Indian Muslims, and I hope for even greater growth. I remember how, in 2023, Kannada Sahitya Parishat, a major, government-backed annual literary event, selected only Hindu authors to present their papers in Haveri. In protest, other writers swiftly organised a similar event in Bengaluru, called Jana Sahitya Sammelana — a ‘People’s Literature Programme’. They invited Muslim writers who had published at least one book to register, and you’ll be astonished to know that about six hundred Muslim Kannada writers had published at least one book in the last year. The same thing happened when we arranged an alternative programme alongside the Akhila Bharata Kannada Sahitya Sammelana.   

More Muslims are now writing in Kannada, and also in Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam. Muslims everywhere are writing in their vernacular language, and a writer can write only when their work is being read by a lot of readers. So, it is happening. Right from the time I began writing, I have written my environment into my work — I use Arabic words commonly spoken in Muslim homes. I say kafan to write about the burial shroud, I say janaza (coffin), I say namaz (daily prayer), and I say assad (lion). Now these words have been accepted as belonging to Kannada and other writers use them as well, including Hindu writers. That acceptance into the language is more important. 

VS: It's wonderful how the number of people a writer reaches multiplies when a translation occurs. Deepa, as a translator, what possibilities do you envision for this practice in the future? 

DB: I want to be very, very hopeful that everything changes and we have utopias all of a sudden. Don't we all? But, honestly, I think real, solid change will probably come not from my generation, but from the one after me.  

After the win, when the initial rush died down, several senior translators offered … I wouldn’t call it resistance, perhaps opinions is a better term. They said it’s great that this translation won the International Booker. Good for you, good for us, good for India, but we are happy to continue doing what we’ve been doing for the past thirty or forty years. I, on the other hand, feel we need a lot more translators fighting to write in different Englishes. My hope lies in translators younger than me – perhaps those just starting out in their twenties or early thirties – who have a more naturalised relationship with English, as compared to translators in their sixties, seventies, or eighties, who have a different relationship with English back home than my generation does (I'm in my forties). Someone who has been translating for three or four decades cannot magically change and bring in these various textures in English — it’s too big a change. But it is one I'm really hoping for.  

Watch the full event recording on our YouTube channel here.