WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2025

In Heart Lamp In Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada, 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.

About the Author

Banu Mushtaq is a writer, activist and lawyer from Karnataka, India. Mushtaq began writing within the progressive protest literary circles in southwestern India in the 1970s and 80s. Critical of the caste system, the Bandaya Sahitya movementgave rise to influential Dalit and Muslim writers, of whom Mushtaq was one of the few women. She is the author of six short story collections,a novel, an essay collection and a poetry collection. She writes in Kannada and has won the Karnataka Sahitya Academy and Daana Chintamani Attimabbe awards.

Deepa Bhasthi is a writer and literary translator based in Kodagu, southern India. Her columns, essays and cultural criticism have been published in India and internationally. Her published translations from Kannada include a novel by Kota Shivarama Karanth and a collection of short stories by Kodagina Gouramma. Her translation of Banu Mushtaq’s stories has won her the English PEN Translates award.