Heart Lamp: Selected Stories

Description

Winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize
Winner of the PEN Translates Award

A monumental first collection in English from Banu Mushtaq: lawyer, activist, champion of Muslim women, and winner of India's highest literary honors.

In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humor, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq's years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women's rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression.

Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it's in her characters--the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost--that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well India's most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come.

Awards

Winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize

Reviews

'One of Karnataka's leading progressive writers.' New Age Islam

'Exploring the lives of those often on the periphery of society, these vivid stories hold immense emotional and moral weight'  —The International Booker Prize 2025 Judges

 

 

Prizes: Long-listed for International Booker Prize 2025.

Author Biography:

Banu Mushtaq is a writer, social activist and lawyer in the state of Karnataka, southern India.

Deepa Bhasthi is a writer and literary translator based in Kodagu, southern India. She translatesfrom Kannada and also publishes essays and cultural criticism.