Heart Lamp:
Selected Stories: Winner of the International Booker Prize 2025
Translated by Deepa Bhasthi
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Heart Lamp:
Selected Stories: Winner of the International Booker Prize 2025
Translated by Deepa Bhasthi
Overview
WINNER OF THE 2025 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. Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humour, 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 as India’s most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come.
Details
- Format
- Size
- Extent
- ISBN
- RRP
- Pub date
- Rights held
- Other rights
- Paperback
- 210mm x 135mm
- 224 pages
- 9781761381836
- AUD$29.99
- 20 May 2025
- ANZ
- And Other Stories
Categories
Praise
‘Heart Lamp is something genuinely new for English readers. A radical translation which ruffles language, to create new textures in a plurality of Englishes. It challenges and expands our understanding of translation. These beautiful, busy, life-affirming stories rise from Kannada, interspersed with the extraordinary socio-political richness of other languages and dialects. It speaks of women’s lives, reproductive rights, faith, caste, power and oppression.’
‘Exploring the lives of those often on the periphery of society, these vivid stories hold immense emotional and moral weight … Heart Lamp returns us to the true, great pleasures of reading: solid storytelling, unforgettable characters, vivid dialogue, tensions simmering under the surface, and a surprise at each turn.’
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.
Translator
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 was a winner of English PEN’s PEN Translates award.
