In conversation with Forbes India after winning one of the most prestigious literary awards for her book Heart Lamp, Mushtaq speaks about the genesis of her stories, what they reflect, her process of writing, and more
Banu Mushtaq, author of 'Heart Lamp' attends the official winners' ceremony of the International Booker Prize 2025 at Tate Modern in London, United Kingdom on May 20, 2025. The International Booker Prize is awarded annually for the finest single work of fiction from around the world which has been translated into English and published in the UK and Ireland.
Photo by Wiktor Szymanowicz/Anadolu via Getty Images
"In a world that often tries to divide us, literature remains one of the last sacred spaces where we can live inside each other's minds, if only for a few pages," said Banu Mushtaq in her acceptance speech after winning the International Booker Prize 2025 for her book of short stories, Heart Lamp. Her words hold true as her short stories written in Kannada, translated and published in English, made history by becoming the only collection of short stories to ever win a Booker Prize.
Heart Lamp, comprising 12 short stories written by Mushtaq between 1990 and 2023, offers a poignant portrayal of the lives of Muslim women in southern India. The struggles depicted in these stories—shaped by religious conservatism and a deeply patriarchal society—reflect many of the real challenges faced by women in the region. The characters were described by judges at the Booker Prize as “astonishing portraits of survival and resilience”.
Over the years, numerous prestigious local and national awards—including the Karnataka Sahitya Academy Award and the Daana Chintamani Attimabbe Award—have been bestowed upon Mushtaq. In 2024, Haseena and Other Stories, the English translation of five of Mushtaq’s short story collections originally published between 1990 and 2012, was awarded the PEN Translation Prize.
The stories in Heart Lamp were selected and translated into English from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, who will share the £50,000 prize. With this win, Bhasthi became the first Indian translator to receive the International Booker.
Mushtaq, 77, hails from Hassan in Karnataka, where she grew up immersed in the Kannada language. Over the years, she built a multifaceted career as a journalist, lawyer, and activist. Her writing was deeply inspired by the pain, suffering, and helpless lives of the women she encountered—stories she felt could only be truly expressed in Kannada. In her speech after the win, she said: “To write in Kannada is to inherit a legacy of cosmic wonder and earthly wisdom.”