For Banu Mushtaq, writer, activist, lawyer, and winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize for Heart Lamp, literature has always been an instrument of truth and resistance. One of India’s most fearless literary voices, she emerged from Karnataka’s Bandaya Sahitya movement of the 1970s and '80s, a radical wave of writers who challenged caste, class, and gender hierarchies through words that burned with conviction. Among that pioneering generation, Banu stood out as one of the few women whose voice carried both rebellion and grace.

Her years as a journalist with Lankesh Patrike from 1981 to 1990, she says, “shaped my political consciousness and my ear for the common person’s language.” That grounding continues to define her writing, which pulses with empathy for the farmer, the Dalit, the migrant, and the woman who carries her world quietly. “People inspire me the most,” she says, “because they are the map, the journey, and the destination of every story I have ever written.”

Over the decades, she has written six short story collections, a novel, an essay collection, and a poetry volume, earning the Karnataka Sahitya Academy and Daana Chintamani Attimabbe awards, among others. Heart Lamp, the first full-length English translation of her work, already translated into Urdu, Hindi, Tamil, and Malayalam, brought her powerful, deeply humane stories to a global readership; one story also appearing in The Paris Review.

In this exclusive interview with WKND, Banu Mushtaq reflects on her journey as a writer, her politics of empathy, and how language itself can be an act of resistance.

Excerpts from an interview:

When did you first recognise that writing was going to be your voice your way of making sense of the world? 

I think writing found me long before I understood what it meant to “be a writer.” I grew up surrounded by stories that are not necessarily in books alone, but in glances, silences, the rhythm of daily life. I was an observant child, perhaps because I learned very early that the world sees each of us through its own inherited lens. My father was an extraordinarily handsome man,  fair-skinned, with eyes that held shades of green and blue. And I, his eldest, entered the world with a darker complexion. In the eyes of relatives and neighbours, this became something to comment on, measure, and diminish.

They called it a flaw. But I knew I needed to find another language to name myself.

I think that is where storytelling began for me…as a quiet rebellion. Writing became the space where I did not have to explain or apologise for existing. When others tried to define me, I wrote myself back into wholeness. I began to describe the world as I experienced it: the trees that spoke in rustling breaths, the moon that was never ashamed of its phases, the tenderness that hides beneath ordinary gestures.

Books were my first refuge. I read voraciously, not to escape reality, but to deepen my conversation with it. And very naturally, I began to write small poems, fragments of stories, impressions of people and places.  It was simply my way of understanding life, of giving shape to emotions that had no public language.

So, if there was a moment, it was not a dramatic revelation, but it was the slow, luminous realisation that on the page, I could be fully human. 

Over the years, I have learned that sometimes the very thing the world tries to silence in us becomes the source of our deepest strength. My storytelling grew from that soil, from pain transformed into clarity, from observation refined into empathy.

How would you describe your writing style?

The language I use is local, intimate, and unpolished in the best sense. It carries regional idioms, everyday humour, and sometimes a certain dark laughter that rises when one has seen too much and felt too deeply. In the earlier years, I often wrote in revolt. When faced with violence, injustice or emotional turbulence, my instinct was to respond through anger, to write sharply, immediately, and without compromise.

Over time, my involvement with various social movements, specially the Dalit movement, farmers’ struggles, feminist collectives, and the Bandaya (resistance) writers’ forum, shaped that urgency in new ways. These were not just political spaces, but intellectual and emotional communities. We debated, we wept, we questioned, we unlearned. The Bandaya Sahitya Sanghatane brought together writers and activists in conversation; it taught me that literature is not separate from lived experience. Resistance, for me, slowly turned into a form of meditation,  a way of holding pain with clarity, of transforming it into language that can heal as much as it disrupts. Today, I would describe my writing as rooted and political, but also contemplative, listening more carefully to silence, memory and the emotional textures of ordinary life.

In that sense, my evolution has not been away from struggle, but towards a more thoughtful, spacious way of carrying it.

What inspires you most? Is it people, places, memories, or moments?

It is always people who inspire me the most. Places, memories, and moments are born out of the presence of people, out of the warmth of their hands, the tremor in their voices, the silences they carry, and the stories they refuse to forget. When I sit among people, I feel history breathing. I see struggles, laughter, resilience, and a thousand unspoken poems living in their eyes. From them, I receive places (villages, streets, fields, and kitchens), each alive with meaning. From them, I receive memories (some tender, some wounding), all necessary. From them, I receive moments that stay like the fragrance of rain on soil.

I have learned that we do not merely observe life, but we inherit it from others. The world becomes intimate only when we share it. 

As someone who has practiced law and activism, how do you hold the space between those  frameworks and the terrain of fictional storytelling?

For me, there is no real divide between the courtroom and the page, as in both spaces there are people, with their wounds, their dignity, and their desire to be heard. When I practiced law, individuals would come to me not merely with “cases,” but with entire lifetimes of struggle, betrayal, and endurance. The legal framework requires me to analyse, to synthesise the facts, to place pain into language that the system recognises, so that it can be addressed through justice. There, my role is to seek remedy, to restore balance.

Activism taught me to listen, law taught me to articulate, and literature allows me to transform. In fiction, I am not limited by evidence acts or procedural codes; I can attend to the unspoken, the subconscious, the emotional truth that the legal system may not fully accommodate. 

So, I stand with one foot in structure and one in uncertainty. Storytelling seeks deeper shifts in consciousness. But the thread connecting them is the human being, their dignity, their rage, their longing for meaning. 

That is the space I hold: between justice and imagination, where the lived experience of people becomes both testimony and poetry. 

Heart Lamp draws from ordinary lives yet makes them luminous. What draws you to the seemingly small, everyday moments that others might overlook?

To me, there is no such thing as an ordinary life. What we call everyday moments are actually the places where the human spirit quietly reveals itself. 

The world is made of small gestures, the way someone waits, the way someone hopes, the way someone endures. I am drawn to these because they are fragile, and yet they hold the weight of entire histories.

Heart Lamp grew from watching these moments with a kind of sacred attentiveness. A poet must carry both a deep observation and an aching heart, only then can silence be heard, only then can the echo of a life continue beyond the body. 

I write to remind myself, and the reader, that a life does not need spectacle to be luminous. The small is never small when you see it with love.

You’ve spoken about writing as a deeply human act. What has writing taught you about empathy and resilience?

Writing, to me, is not merely a human act, it is a politically proactive act. On the surface, it appears intimate and personal, but at its core, it is a public gesture of resistance. When I write, I am constantly demanding social justice, challenging the deeply rooted injustices of caste, class, and gender. Writing compels me to look straight into the eyes of pain, my own and that of the communities I speak with and speak for.

In that journey, empathy and resilience emerge as both synonymous and contradictory. Empathy asks me to feel, softly, vulnerably, to open the wound. Resilience asks me to survive, to hold myself together even as the world turns harsh. Writing is the space where these two meet, collide, and sometimes negotiate with each other. Every day, writing is an experiment…some days it is revolt, some days it is a healing ritual, and some days it is simply an attempt to breathe in a suffocating world.

The recognition from the Booker Prize has brought your voice to a global audience. Has that experience changed your perspective on your craft? If yes, how?

Yes, the Booker recognition has widened my perspective, but it has not changed the core of my craft. I have always written from a very rooted place,  from the soil that raised me, from the voices of ordinary people, from anger, tenderness, and memory. That remains unchanged.

What has shifted is my sense of listening. When your work begins to travel across borders, you realise that the local is not small,  it is, in fact, universal. The dialects, idioms, the humour, the wounds, the rebellions of my region,  I used to think of them as intimate conversations with my own people. But now I see how readers in distant geographies are able to feel themselves in these same textures of life. That has given me a quieter confidence in staying true to where I come from.

I do not feel the need to “polish” or “internationalise” my language. Instead, the recognition has reaffirmed that authenticity carries its own translation. It has also reminded me of my responsibility to continue writing with honesty, courage, and accountability to the communities and histories that speak through me.

So, yes. My audience has grown. But my voice still sits in the same courtyard, on the same woven mat, under the same sky. Only now, the echo travels farther.

What does the act of writing give you that nothing else does?

Writing, for me, is not a hobby or even a profession, it is a way of staying alive in a world that often demands silence. When I write, I am able to hold pain without drowning in it. I can step into the fire of memory, of injustice, of longing, and yet return with something that can be shared. Nothing else gives me that. Not conversation, not activism, not even love.

Writing allows me to hear the whispers beneath noise, the voice of the soil in Hassan, the breath of my grandmother’s prayers, the laughter of the Dalit women who know how to rebel simply by existing with dignity. It gives me a space where I can be both brutally honest and deeply tender. Where I can be wounded and still whole.

On the page, I am unafraid. Writing is the only place where my anger becomes clarity, my grief becomes a bridge, and my questions are allowed to remain questions. It gives me freedom. It gives me truth. It gives me myself.

For young writers, especially those starting in regional languages, what would you say is the key to creating work that feels both authentic and timeless?

For young writers, especially those starting in regional languages, the key is to trust the soil you are grown from.

We often feel a pressure to sound ‘universal’ or ‘sophisticated,’ as though literature becomes valuable only when it resembles something already recognised elsewhere. But timeless writing is born when you write with fidelity to your own textures, the idioms of your grandmother, the silences in your streets, the laughter and grief of your people.

Language is not just a tool; it is a memory. Regional languages carry histories of resistance, longing, migration, humiliation, celebration. So, the work becomes timeless when the writer listens deeply to these histories. When you do not edit out your accent, your slang, your folk rhythm. When you do not fear the local.

Also, do not be in a hurry to become a writer. First, be a witness. Stand among your people. Let their struggles, celebrations, songs, and wounds shape your inner ear. When you write from that place, your work will not only feel authentic, but  it will become part of a larger cultural memory. Timelessness is not something we aim for; it is something that happens when our writing is rooted deeply enough to survive changing seasons.

So, I would say: Write like you are preserving something precious. Write like your language is alive because of you.

What are the stories you still feel compelled to tell — whether in short-form, novel, essay or poetry?

In this fractured world, dividing people has become strategic. It is not accidental. It is curated, rehearsed, sponsored. So, the stories I feel compelled to tell are those that remind us of our shared pulse, our interdependence, the ancient truth that we are made of each other.

I want to write about the ones who are pushed to the margins, the farmer whose hands know the language of soil, the Dalit child whose laughter resists centuries of violence, the migrant who leaves home to build another’s city, the woman who walks alone at dawn holding the whole house together with an invisible thread of labour and tenderness.

These are the lives that rarely enter history books, yet they carry civilisations in their breath. They are stories of those who continue to love in a world that keeps inventing new ways to break them. Stories of stubborn hope, of survival with dignity, of communities that refuse to be turned against one another. These are not stories I tell for them, rather, they are stories I tell with them, because I am also made of the same soil, the same longing, the same wound……and ultimately, I believe literature’s deepest courage is this: to remind us that we belong to one another. 

wknd@khaleejtimes.com