Indian writer Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp wins GBP 50,000 International Booker 2025

Leo Tolstoy’s famous opening lines in 'Anna Karenina' - "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" - come to mind while reading Banu Mushtaq’s ‘Heart Lamp’, a collection of 12 stories written between 1990 and 2023. Broadly, Mushtaq's stories follow the lives of Muslim women who are constrained by tradition and responsibilities. Her protagonists are often denied opportunities to fulfill their desire and are mostly resented for airing any grievances.

'Heart Lamp', originally published by an indie publisher in the UK, comprises stories about Indian Muslim women who are trapped by the expectations of their families, their community and their upbringing. The stories often talk about what’s due to the women, and what’s denied so easily and pervasively. And yet, the stories themselves don't read like laments. Mushtaq - and in the English translation, Bhasthi - seem interested in capturing the rhythms of everyday lives; we see friendships forming, social gatherings, and illnesses taking their toll.

Women are wronged in each of these stories, and yet how the tragedy unfolds is different in each. In the titular story, "Heart Lamp", for example, a woman tries to rally support from her family to speak up against her cheating husband, but all she gets is advice to go back and thank her stars that things aren’t worse for her.

In many of the stories in this collection, Mushtaq paints the mother-daughter relationship exquisitely. In the story “Heart Lamp” as well as the first story of the collection, “Stone Slabs for Shaista Mahal”, for example, you see the eldest daughters as inheritors of misfortune, responsibility–and potentially grave prospects–from their mothers. There are no fairytale endings in these stories; and when a resolution is offered at all, it is often a compromise cobbled together by the women themselves.

Over and over again, Mushtaq’s stories show us men who are drunk on their own importance, who are fickle, who are entitled. The women in her stories–even when they seem independent, educated, well-settled–are easily displaced, disadvantaged, dismissed by these same men who claim to love them.

By her own admission, the short story is Banu Mushtaq’s favourite genre to write. This love of writing short stories shows in 'Heart Lamp', where the writer, and translator, convey the–often tragic–lot of their protagonists in story after story, through short–even sprightly–sentences that convey the unfairness and the tragedy of it all with a lightness that only serves to highlight it more.

A lawyer and activist in addition to being a writer, Mushtaq has talked about her own struggles with her conservative in-laws and postpartum depression in interviews since the book was nominated for the international prize. Indeed, the story "Heart Lamp" draws on her own experience, of dousing herself in white petrol with the intent to self-immolate. In life, her husband prevented her effort at self-harm, whereas in the story, it is the protagonists' children.

Max Porter, chair of the International Booker Prize 2025 judges, explained why 'Heart Lamp' won on The Booker Prizes substack: "These beautiful, busy, life-affirming stories rise from Kannada, interspersed with the extraordinary socio-political richness of other languages and dialects. It speaks of women’s lives, reproductive rights, faith, caste, power and oppression... This was the book the judges really loved, right from our first reading."

Speaking to The Booker Prizes website, Banu Mushtaq said: "My stories are about women – how religion, society, and politics demand unquestioning obedience from them, and in doing so, inflict inhumane cruelty upon them, turning them into mere subordinates. The daily incidents reported in the media and the personal experiences I have endured have been my inspiration."