“Whether you’re dressing up or down there are always questions around the male gaze and what it means to live in a woman’s body and how much you reveal and how much you hide,” says Kamila Shamsie, whose seventh novel Home Fire has just won the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

In her modern take on Sophocles’ Greek tragedy Antigone, the discourse around Muslim women and their bodies is just one of the standout elements; Home Fire is a timely and eerily prescient novel, which questions what happens when society, family, love and politics collide, and loyalties are split.

Isma and her younger sister Aneeka are dealing with the fallout of their brother Parvaiz having gone to work for the media arm of ISIS. The country’s first Muslim Home Secretary Karamat Lone has proposed to strip those who go to fight for ISIS of their British citizenship. His son Eamonn is pursuing a relationship with Aneeka, which she hopes will help save her brother from the reaches of both ISIS and the British government.

With Isma and Aneeka, Shamsie pushes back against the popular media narrative that Muslim women in headscarves are oppressed and repressed; both characters are independent, educated and liberated.

“I have never met a woman in a headscarf for whom her headscarf is the primary thing about her,” says Shamsie. “So I was never going to write a character to whom that was the most significant thing or who fit into that stereotype. My line is that Malala Yousafzai wears a headscarf, so could we stop saying that it equals repressed women.”

As well as tapping into discussions around women’s clothing choices, Home Fire also presented Karamat Lone, a man who wears and sheds his Muslim identity as and when it suits him politically, months before the ascension of Sajid Javid to the post of Home Secretary in reality. The parallels between the two men can at times seem a little uncanny.

“I did think if I’m going to have someone who will reach the position of Home Secretary and is going to be in the Tory party, what will his relationship to his Muslimness and his migrancy be… Every time Sajid Javid says something, someone on Twitter will tweet it at me and say ‘Karamat Lone’, and sometimes I will think, yes that is Karamat Lone, and other times I feel very defensive of Karamat Lone, saying ‘he would not be saying that’.”

Kamila Shamsie’s brilliant and timely novel wins Women’s Prize