Heart Lamp: Selected Stories
Twelve stories of Muslim women in southern India, written in Kannada across three decades, colliding with tradition and modernity at once.
Twelve stories written in Kannada between 1990 and 2023, selected and translated by Deepa Bhasthi, who kept the Urdu and Arabic of her characters’ speech rather than smoothing it into English. Banu Mushtaq spent decades as a lawyer and activist in Karnataka, and her women, the wives and mothers and widows and girls, meet tradition and modernity at the same moment and are given no clean way through. It won the 2025 International Booker Prize, the first Kannada work to do so.
Recommended by 1 Person
Anton Hur
Oh, many things. But I have got to say that for me it was the translation—so daring and textured and vitalic. The stories also, for a book that has the word “heart” in the title, kept breaking mine. The way these women keep colliding with both tradition and modernity is so acutely observed. Anyone—of any gender or age or country—can’t help but relate to their struggles between past and present. We’re all doing that.
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