Heart Lamp

By: Banu Mushtaq, Deepa Bhasthi - translator

Narrated by: Sukruta Govindan

WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2025

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.”