Winner of the International Booker Prize.
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.
Translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi.
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.
Read: ‘The Shroud’ by Banu Mushtaq, published in The Dial (2025)
First line: On days when it was impossible for Shaziya to wake up in time for the dawn namaz, she would blame it on her high blood pressure, and had a habit of saying she had no peace because of those damn tablets.
Watch Ambika Mod read from Heart Lamp.