Exclusive: ‘Writing is breathing’: Booker Prize 2025 winner Banu Mushtaq on defying death threats and writing stories that matter

“Receiving an education does not [necessarily] make a woman strong,” she says, explaining how in a culturally traditional marriage, the bride is put under a lot of pressure given the expectations of bearing and raising children and running a household, for example. “Education is only a piece of paper. It will not give her the power or enough experience to face challenges after entering a matrimonial home. When facing these pressures, some people will survive and some will succumb [to the struggle].”

Once, Mushtaq had a quarrelling couple in her law office, where the wife was complaining how she felt unfairly snubbed by the husband, who was giving all his attention to his widowed mother. The husband retorted to the rebuke and claimed that he would marry his mother off to an affluent person in an elaborate wedding. “That will not happen in the Indian context, because no son will allow his mother to get married at that age. I was astonished to hear this man’s response,” she recalls. “Here, men are highly egoistic. A son marrying his mother off in all this pomp and show was new to me.” This would become the basis for the story A Decision of the Heart.

Mushtaq highlights similar difficulties in stories such as Black Cobras, which was adapted into a film by pioneering director Girish Kasaravalli in 2004: a woman is abandoned by her husband after their fourth child is born a daughter; the husband refuses to contribute to caring for the family, and the baby dies of malnutrition and fever. In Fire Rain, a married woman returns home to ask for her share of an inheritance but is denied by her brother, who, as the head of the household, controls the money and property. In Stone Slabs for Shaista Mahal, a wife is treated by her husband as a reproductive machine and slave; when she dies, the husband simply marries another young girl, who isn’t much older than his children.

Mushtaq herself married for love—not that that has protected her from some of the same struggles as her characters. “My identities both as a Muslim and a woman have haunted me throughout my life,” she says. In 2000, a fatwa, or Islamic legal ruling, was issued against Mushtaq for her activism, after she publicly stated that Islam did not prohibit women from praying in mosques, but rather that patriarchs at certain mosque unlawfully denied them entry. The fatwa was lifted three months later, but it wasn’t long before a man tried to stab her with a knife. Luckily, her husband overpowered the attacker.

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Since winning the Booker, the writer has received humiliating comments saying it was her translator Deepa Bhasthi and not her who had won the prize. “They want to tarnish my credibility as a writer and as a Booker Prize winner. Of course, 90 per cent of the people rejoice in my work, but there are 10 per cent who really want to hurt and discourage me. They want to see that I stop writing and think that I should not be in the limelight.”

In September, the writer was invited by the Karnataka government to inaugurate the Hindu festival Mysore Dasara. “It’s a great festival for everybody living in Karnataka and a prestigious honour for me,” she says. But not everyone was as enthusiastic, with some saying that a Muslim should not be at a Hindu festival. Mushtaq did end up inaugurating the event, but not without security.

Although at the time of such setbacks the writer felt agitated, she now sees them as formative. “If I have to survive, I have to fight back [for] a social cause or personal cause,” she says, adding that she’s pleased to see how “all these moments are now recorded in the history of Karnataka and India”.

Her greatest motivation comes from supporters, victims who find solace in her stories, and the late social reformer and political leader Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. He chaired the drafting committee of the Constituent Assembly, the body that framed the country’s constitution, and was India’s first minister for law and justice. “He was highly discriminated against throughout his life because he was born a Dalit,” she says, referring to the “untouchable” class in the traditional Hindu caste system. “I am really impressed by how he, despite this, went on to draft the constitution.”

Inspired by his efforts and her experience of religious conflicts, Mushtaq intends to continue to write more stories about caste, gender discrimination and majoritarianism. “Plurality is the beauty of India,” she says, referring the many cultures and religions that make up the country. “But some people are trying to end it.” She hopes through her work to continue to share the tapestry of cultures and experience that make India what it is. As well as writing her autobiography, which she hopes to finish this year, she is spending time on tours; India by the Bay invited her to speak in Hong Kong this month in a talk presented in collaboration with the Hong Kong International Literary Festival. “My aim is not to win accolades,” she says. “I want to reach a wider audience so that they understand what life in South India and the Indian context is like.”

And while she hopes to continue to spotlight the marginalised, she acknowledges there are unavoidable roadblocks. “I am walking on a double-edged sword: there are the Muslim communal forces on one side, and the Sangh Parivar [a collective of right-wing Hindu nationalist groups] communal forces on the other,” she says. “I have lots of raw material, and a lot of feelings I don’t know how to express [safely]. At this juncture, I don’t think I will be able to narrate those stories. I have to write them and keep them in a safe place, so that after my death, somebody may publish them at the suitable time.”

Rest assured she will continue to put pen to paper, though. “Even in the presence of a death threat, persecution or someone directly telling me to stop writing, I will continue to write, because without expressing myself, I cannot survive,” she says. “For me, writing is like breathing.”

Banu Mushtaq will deliver a talk organised by India by the Bay on November 8, 2025 at Asia Society Hong Kong.

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