Heart Lamp: Selected Stories

Heart Lamp: Selected Stories by Banu Mushtaq is the Winner of the International Booker Prize 2025 — the first Kannada-language work and the first short story collection in the prize's history to receive this honour. In twelve luminous and unforgettable stories, Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India, through a translation of rare grace and fidelity by Deepa Bhasthi.

Originally written in Kannada between 1990 and 2023, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq's decades as a journalist, lawyer, and activist who tirelessly championed women's rights and protested against every form of caste and religious oppression. Her characters — sparky children, audacious grandmothers, buffoonish religious authorities, resilient mothers — are drawn with astonishing precision and warmth.

Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, and excoriating, the stories build disconcerting emotional heights from a rich, deeply local spoken idiom. Mushtaq writes of faith, patriarchy, class, and the quiet heroism of women surviving their circumstances with intelligence and spirit — and does so with the dry humour and moral clarity of a truly exceptional literary artist.

A historic achievement and a deeply deserving prize winner, Heart Lamp announces one of South Asia's most important literary voices to the world. This is a book that will be read and treasured for generations.

Product Details

ISBN: 9780143464471
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Author: Banu Mushtaq (Trans. Deepa Bhasthi)
Publisher: Penguin India
Recommended Age: 18+
Weight: Approx. 240 g
Delivery Time: 5-7 Business Days