Heart Lamp
“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.”
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize
Winner of a PEN Translates Award
In Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India.
Written originally in Kannada, 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. At once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it's in the characters-the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, 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.
Through this translation, Heart Lamp's powerful stories now find their way to a broader community of readers across the world. Max Porter, the award-winning author, and Chair of the Jury for the International Booker Prize says-"Deepa Bhasthi's radical translation ruffles language to create new textures in a plurality of Englishes. It challenges and expands our understanding of translation."
Praise