Winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize
A PEN Translates Award winner
In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions have garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well India’s most prestigious literary awards.
‘A significant presence in Kannada literature, Banu Mushtaq reveals the varied realities of contemporary women with rare talent and art. Deepa Bhasthi’s rich translation captures the original’s nuances of voice, context and experience, bringing this important work into English for new readers in India and internationally.’ PEN Presents Selection Panel
"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
"Banu Mushtaq was one of the founding members of the Bandaya Sahitya Sanghatane, which means the Rebel Literary Movement. A favorite phrase of the movement was: 'The dear friend whose heart beats for people's pain.' We see this compassion and love for the people, in particular Muslim women, that Mushtaq writes about in her stories. As a friend, she writes from amidst them, for them, through the struggles, details and complexity of their lives. Deepa Bhasthi's beautiful translation shares these stories with a wider readership." --Kavita Bhanot
"With a tender heart and a sharp eye for nuance, Banu Mushtaq pens stories with deep contextual understanding of patriarchal institutions and with sympathy to the modern realities of contemporary Muslim women." --Joshua Jones
"A significant presence in Kannada literature, Banu Mushtaq reveals the varied realities of contemporary women with rare talent and art. Deepa Bhasthi's rich translation captures the original's nuances of voice, context and experience, bringing this important work into English for new readers in India and internationally." --PEN Presents Selection Panel
"One of Karnataka's leading progressive writers." --New Age Islam
"Mushtaq makes her English-language debut with this virtuosic collection . . . The stories are united by a keen eye for the interplay between their characters' social circumstances and inner lives, as religious authority and economic class exert their influence. It's an excellent introduction to an author of rare talent."--Publishers Weekly, starred review
'Bhasthi provides us a glimpse into Mushtaq's code-switching in her translator's note and through her superb translation . . . [The] final story, "Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord!" is written as an everywoman's plea to God . . . Her account, she says, has been "written from the heart, a woman's heart, a string of letters written with the heart's sharp nib and the red ink inside"--a fitting description for Heart Lamp as a whole as Mushtaq and Bhasthi evoke and illuminate the inner worlds of women.' --Areeb Ahmad, Words without Borders
'This selection of Mushtaq's stories about Muslim girls and women in southern India, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, is a finalist for this year's International Booker Prize. Mushtaq is a journalist, lawyer and women's rights activist, and these fictional stories span more than 30 years of her career as an author.' --Washington Post
'These twelve stories, selected by her translator Deepa Bhasthi, offer affecting portraits of family and community. Specifically, they illuminate the lives of Muslim and Dalit women and children in southern India . . . Mushtaq's compassion and dark humour give texture to her stories. These deceptively simple tales decry the subjugation of women while celebrating their resilience. Bhasthi's nuanced translation retains several Kannada, Urdu and Arabic words, eloquently conveying the language's enduring tradition of oral storytelling.' --Lucy Popescu, Financial Times
'Longlisted for the 2025 International Booker, this excellent collection of short stories by the writer, activist, and lawyer Banu Mushtaq depicts the ordinary lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Particular highlights for me included the opening story to the collection, "Stone Slabs for Shaista Mahal," exploring the disposable nature of wifedom under patriarchy, and "A Decision of the Heart," in which a man decides to marry off his widowed mother. Deepa Bhasthi's translator's note, in which she delves into the process of translating from the Kannada language, offers some interesting insights into how language structures everyday relationships, too.' --Rhian Sasseen, Phrase books
About the Author
Banu Mushtaq is a writer, activist and lawyer in the state of Karnataka, southern India. Mushtaq began writing within the progressive protest literary circles in southwestern India in the 1970s and 1980s: critical of the caste and class system, the Bandaya Sahitya movement gave 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 major awards for her literary works, including the Karnataka Sahitya Academy and the Daana Chintamani Attimabbe awards. Previously translated into Urdu, Hindi, Tamil and Malayalam, the first book-length translation of her work into English will be Heart Lamp: Selected Stories, to be published in 2025, while one of the stories from Heart Lamp has been published in the Paris Review. Deepa Bhasthi is a writer and literary translator based in Kodagu, southern India. She translates from Kannada and also publishes essays and cultural criticism.
