Latest news with #womenauthors
BBC News
11-06-2025
- Health
- BBC News
Women's Prize for Non-Fiction 'amplifies female voices'
A palliative care doctor shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction says the prestigious book award "amplifies" the importance of female Rachel Clarke, from Oxford, and MP Yuan Yang, who represents Earley and Woodley in Berkshire, spoke to BBC South ahead of Thursday's award ceremony in London. Both women said they were delighted to be on the shortlist and hoped it would bring new readers to their work. "The voices of women in non-fiction are often overlooked and eclipsed by male voices," said Dr Clarke. "This prize amplifies their voices and says to girls and women that their stories matter."Dr Clarke said she was compelled to write The Story of a Heart when she read newspaper articles about nine-year-old Max who received a heart donation from a girl called Keira - also nine - who had suffered catastrophic injuries in a car said she approached Keira's family incredibly carefully. "I knew they would be entrusting an incredibly personal story to me. I wanted to honour the little girl that Keira was," Dr Clarke said. The book follows the medical journey that ultimately saved Max's life and tells the stories of those who helped along the way: doctors, nurses and paramedics. Dr Clarke, who specialises in palliative care, draws comparisons between being a good doctor and being a good author. "As a doctor you have to care about people, you have to listen to their stories and you have to communicate stories back to them," she said. "One of the saddest things is when the patient thinks the story of their life is over. Sometimes you can help people realise that life still can be worth living with a terminal illness because it absolutely can." Yuan Yang's book, Private Revolutions, Coming of Age in a New China, tells the stories of four women growing up in the '80s and '90s in a country that was rapidly changing. Ms Yang, who won her seat for Labour last year, started writing it while working in Beijing as a journalist. "Some of the women I met had stories that were so immense that they couldn't be captured in newspaper reporting," she said. "I wanted to explore what it's like to live through such a huge economic and social transformation."Ms Yang, the first Chinese-born British MP, moved to the UK when she was four. She said she often considered what her life would have been like had her parents chosen to remain in China."I'm really glad they settled down in Reading and gave me and my brother a more stable life. For many of my contemporaries in China their lives continued to be unsettled." When Ms Yang was born in 1989 the vast majority of China was agricultural. "Most people were living below the poverty line, my dad's parents included. So you had millions of migrant workers who moved to the city to work in factories and often left children behind in the village," she said, "Moving from farmland to megacities like Beijing and Shanghai is a huge acceleration. "I'm interested in what that does to people on an economic level but also in terms of their relationships with their families and their loved ones." Both women say they were "humbled" to be shortlisted for such a prestigious prize alongside fellow nominees Neneh Cherry, Helen Scales, Chloe Dalton and Clare Yang said she hoped it brought the lives of the women in her book to a greater number of readers. "It was published just before the general election was called in 2024 when my main focus was on campaigning and then setting up the office," she said. "I'm just grateful that the book found its way to readers and to these judges - and I hope it will find its way to more people." You can follow BBC Oxfordshire on Facebook, X (Twitter), or Instagram.
Asharq Al-Awsat
08-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Asharq Al-Awsat
How a Booker Prize-Winning Work From India Redefined Translation
By Pragati K.B. Banu Mushtaq's book 'Heart Lamp' last month became the first story collection to win the International Booker Prize. It was also the first work translated from Kannada, a southern Indian language, to receive the award. But 'Heart Lamp' is unusual for another reason. It is not a translation of an existing book. Instead, Ms. Mushtaq's translator, Deepa Bhasthi, selected the stories that make up 'Heart Lamp' from among Ms. Mushtaq's oeuvre of more than 60 stories written over three decades and first published in Kannada-language journals. The collaboration that won the two women the world's most prestigious award for fiction translated into English represents an extraordinary empowerment of Ms. Bhasthi in the author-translator relationship. It also shows the evolution of literary translation in India as a growing number of works in the country's many languages are being translated into English. That has brought Indian voices to new readers and enriched the English language. 'I myself have broken all kinds of stereotypes, and now my book has also broken all stereotypes,' Ms. Mushtaq said in a phone interview. Ms. Mushtaq, 77, is an author, lawyer and activist whose life epitomizes the fight of a woman from a minority community against social injustice and patriarchy. The stories in 'Heart Lamp' are feminist stories, based on the everyday lives of ordinary women, many of them Muslim. Ms. Bhasthi, in a brief separate interview, said that she had chosen the stories in 'Heart Lamp' for their varied themes and because they were the ones she 'enjoyed reading and knew would work well in English.' Ms. Mushtaq said she had given Ms. Bhasthi 'a free hand and never meddled with her translation.' But consultation was sometimes necessary, Ms. Mushtaq said, because she had used colloquial words and phrases that 'people in my community used every day while talking.' Finding translations for such vernacular language can be a challenge, Ms. Bhasthi, who has translated two other works from Kannada, wrote in The Paris Review. Some words, she wrote, 'only ever halfheartedly migrate to English.' But that migration can be an act of creation. In the brief interview, Ms. Bhasthi said that her translation of 'Heart Lamp' was like 'speaking English with an accent.' That quality was especially lauded by the Booker jury. Its chairman, the writer Max Porter, called the book 'something genuinely new for English readers.' He said the work was 'a radical translation' that created 'new textures in a plurality of Englishes' and expanded 'our understanding of translation.' Translation is a complex matrix in India, a country that speaks at least 121 languages. One saying in Hindi loosely translates to 'every two miles, the taste of water changes, and every eight miles, the language changes.' Twenty-two of India's tongues are major literary languages with a considerable volume of writing. Translations can happen between any of these, as well as in and out of English. This year's International Booker was the second for an Indian book. Geetanjali Shree won in 2022 for 'Tomb of Sand,' translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell. But for too long, said Manasi Subramaniam, editor in chief of Penguin Random House India, which published 'Heart Lamp,' translation operated largely in one direction, feeding literature from globally dominant languages to other languages. 'It's wonderful to see literature from Indian languages enriching and complicating English in return,' Ms. Subramaniam said. But even as works in India's regional languages find more domestic and international readers, there has been an increasing push toward making India a monoculture — with a single prominent language, Hindi — since Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014. Hindi is spoken mostly in northern India, and efforts by Mr. Modi's Hindu nationalist government to impose the language in the south have been a source of friction and violence. As internal migration grows in India, skirmishes between Hindi speakers and non-Hindi speakers happen virtually daily in southern states like Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Kannada, the language of Ms. Mushtaq's original stories, is spoken by the people of Karnataka, whose capital is Bengaluru, India's technology center. There are about 50 million native speakers of Kannada. In 2013, a Kannada literary giant, U.R. Ananthamurthy, was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. In the past decade, books by Vivek Shanbhag, translated into English by Srinath Perur, have popularized Kannada literature among non-Kannada domestic and international readers. One of his books, 'Ghachar Ghochar,' was listed among the top books of 2017 by critics at The New York Times. Unlike Ms. Mushtaq and Ms. Bhasthi, this author-translator team engaged in a 'lot of back-and-forth' to 'bring out what was flowing beneath the original text while ensuring the translation remained as close to the original as possible,' Mr. Shanbhag said. In her acceptance speech for the Booker award, Ms. Bhasthi expressed hope that it would lead to greater interest in Kannada literature. She recited lines from a popular Kannada song immortalized on movie screens by the actor Rajkumar, which compares the Kannada language to 'a river of honey, a rain of milk' and 'sweet ambrosia.' The New York Times
CBC
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Indian author Banu Mushtaq wins International Booker Prize with short story collection
Indian author Banu Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi won the International Booker Prize for fiction for Heart Lamp, a collection of 12 short stories written over a period of more than 30 years and which chronicle the everyday lives and struggles of women in southern India. The award was announced by bestselling Booker Prize-longlisted author Max Porter in his role as chair of the five-member voting panel, at a ceremony at London's Tate Modern. The annual award celebrates the best works of fiction from around the world that have been translated into English and published in the U.K. or Ireland. The £50,000 (approx. $93,188 Cdn) grand prize is divided equally between writer and translator. There were no Canadians nominated this year. The 2025 CBC Poetry Prize is now open The prize was set up to boost the profile of fiction in other languages — which accounts for only a small share of books published in Britain — and to salute the underappreciated work of literary translators. It is the first time the International Booker Prize has been given to a collection of short stories. Bhasthi is the first Indian translator — and ninth female translator — to win the prize since it took on its current form in 2016. Mushtaq is the sixth female author to be awarded the prize since then. Written in Kannada, which is spoken by around 65 million people, primarily in southern India, Porter praised the "radical" nature of the translation, adding that "it's been a joy" to listen to the evolving appreciation of the stories by members of the jury. "These beautiful, busy, life-affirming stories rise from Kannada, interspersed with the extraordinary socio-political richness of other languages and dialects," said Porter. "It speaks of women's lives, reproductive rights, faith, caste, power and oppression." The book, which beat five other finalists, comprises stories written from 1990 to 2023. They were selected and curated by Bhasthi, who was keen to preserve the multilingual nature of southern India in her translation. Mushtaq, who is a lawyer and activist as well as writer, told a short list reading event on Sunday that the stories "are about women – how religion, society and politics demand unquestioning obedience from them, and in doing so, inflict inhumane cruelty upon them, turning them into mere subordinates." The prize money is to be divided equally between author and translator. Each is presented with a trophy too. Last year's winner was German author Jenny Erpenbeck for Kairos, the story of a tangled love affair during the final years of East Germany's existence, translated by Michael Hofmann.
