Heart Lamp

Until 25 Sep: Each purchase of Heart Lamp comes with discount codes for Translation Day Singapore – 15% off the TDSG 1-Day Pass and 10% off Deepa Bhasthi's lecture. You'll receive these codes via email within 1 day of your purchase.

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By Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi

A monumental first collection in English from Banu Mushtaq: lawyer, activist, champion of Muslim women, and winner of India’s highest literary honors.

Format: Paperback
Pages: 192

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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 humor, 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 India’s most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come.