Banu Mushtaq likes to call a spade a spade. Each of the 12 stories in her book Heart Lamp, which has just won the 2025 International Booker prize, reads like one has entered a courtroom where women are interlocutors and judges. Few short-story writers in recent times have used literary firepower thus, with empathy and the skill of satire to write about how Indian women, especially from the Muslim community, negotiate the threefold pressures of family, rituals and religion—but with pushback.
The International Booker prize was established in 2005. Short-story writer Alice Munro was its third winner in 2009. No short-story anthology has since won—until Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp. Another first: translator Deepa Bhasthi, who shares the prize with Mushtaq, is the first Indian translator to win the award. The Booker win is a boost for Indian regional literature, and for translations of literature in various Indian languages into English.
It has to be hailed for the achievement that it is. Most of all, it is special for speakers and readers of the Kannada language; the last time a writer of Kannada literature was on the Man Booker shortlist was in 2013. U R Ananthamurthy’s 2013 nomination amounts to, in hindsight, the proverbial passing of the baton to Mushtaq—an activist-lawyer-writer who not only writes radical literature, but has made literature the ground for radicalism. That too in a language she only began to be literate in from the age of eight.
At the time of accepting the award, Mushtaq spoke poetically about her chosen art form, the short story—she has to her credit six collections and has won several prestigious local and national awards—and of the experience of writing it from a place of worth. “This book was born from the belief that no story is ever small,” she asserted. Mushtaq came of age in the early 1970s when movements against Brahmin hegemony roiled Karnataka, coupled with a movement for ‘Bandaya (rebel) sahitya’ that called for socially-conscious Kannada literature. Mushtaq’s thoughts and pen have engaged with that time, and are sharp. At a time when freedom of expression comes at a cost, especially for those from the minority community, Banu Mushtaq’s pen shows what it can do if things are truly free.