Congratulations to Heart Lamp, originally written in Kannada by Banu Mushtaq who is the winner of the International Booker Prize 2025 ! The book has been translated by Deepa Bhasthi who is a writer and literary translator based in Kodagu, 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.

Heart Lamp is published in the UK by And Other Stories.