Heart Lamp: Selected Sories: Selected Stories

Synopsis

The International Booker Prize Winner 2025. 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 humour, 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 as India's most prestigious literary awards. BANU MUSHTAQ is a writer, activist and lawyer in the state of Karnataka, southern India. Mushtaq began writing within the progressive protest literary circles in southwestern India in the 1970s and 1980s: critical of the caste and class system, the Bandaya Sahitya movement gave rise to influential Dalit and Muslim writers, of whom Mushtaq was one of the few women. She is the author of six short story collections, a novel, an essay collection and a poetry collection. She writes in Kannada and has won major awards for her literary works, including the Karnataka Sahitya Academy and the Daana Chintamani Attimabbe Awards. DEEPA BHASTHI is a writer and literary translator based in Kodagu, southern India. Her columns, essays and cultural criticism have been published in India and internationally. Her published translations from Kannada include a novel by Kota Shivarama Karanth and a collection of short stories by Kodagina Gouramma. Her translation of Banu Mushtaq's stories was a winner of English PEN'S PEN Translates award. 'In a dozen stories--written across three decades--Banu Mushtaq, a major voice within progressive Kannada literature--portrays the lives of those often on the periphery of society: girls and women in Muslim communities in southern India. These stories speak truth to power and slice through the fault lines of caste, class, and religion widespread in contemporary society exposing the rot within: corruption, oppression, injustice, violence. Yet, at its heart, Heart Lamp returns us to the true, great pleasures of reading: solid storytelling, unforgettable characters, vivid dialogue, tensions simmering under the surface, and a surprise at each turn. Deceptively simple, these stories hold immense emotional, moral, and socio-political weight, urging us to dig deeper.'--THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2025 JUDGES

Copyright:

2025

Book Details

Book Quality:

Excellent

Book Size:

223 Pages

ISBN-13:

9781916751163

Publisher:

And Other Stories

Date of Addition:

10/07/25

Copyrighted By:

Banu Mushtaq, Deepa Bhasthi

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Literature and Fiction, Social Studies, Sociology

Submitted By:

Terry Gorman

Proofread By:

Terry Gorman

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.