On February 25, the Booker Prize Foundation announced the longlist for the 2025 International Booker Prize. Among the 13 authors, all longlisted for the first time this year, was Kannada author Banu Mushtaq — in a first for both her and Kannada literature. Mushtaq has been longlisted for her book 'Heart Lamp'. Translated by Deepa Bhasthi, 'Heart Lamp' marks Mushtaq's first appearance in English.
A writer, activist, journalist, and lawyer based in Karnataka, Mushtaq has been active within progressive Kannada literary circles since the 1970s as a proponent of the anti-caste and class-critical Bandaya Sahitya Movement which gave rise to several influential Dalit and Muslim writers in the late 20th century. The author of six short fiction collections, a novel, a collection of essays, and a collection of poetry, she has previously received the Karnataka Sahitya Academy award and the Daana Chintamani Attimabbe award.
Originally published in Kannada between 1990 and 2023, the 12 short stories collected in 'Heart Lamp' are at once witty, vivid, moving, and critical portraits of family and community through the lived experiences of those often relegated to the margins of society: girls and women in Muslim communities in southern India. Drawing from Mushtaq's time as a journalist and a lawyer championing women's rights inside courtrooms and outside, these stories dissect and examine the unbearable festering of female rage until it reaches a tipping point. In these stories about rascal children, audacious grandmothers, buffoonish religious leaders, clueless husbands, and Indian women surviving their feelings of rage and rebellion at great personal cost, Mushtaq emerges as a masterful writer and a keen observer of human nature.
"Deceptively simple, these stories hold immense emotional, moral, and socio-political weight, urging us to dig deeper."— The 2025 International Booker Prize judges on Banu Mushtaq's 'Heart Lamp'
The International Booker Prize 2025 shortlist of six books will be announced on Tuesday, April 8. The winner will be announced at a ceremony at London’s Tate Modern on Tuesday, May 20. 'Heart Lamps' by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, will be published in India and the UK in April 2025.
Read 'Red Lungi', one of the stories from 'Heart Lamp' published in the Summer 2024 issue of The Paris Review, here.
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