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The stories were translated by Deepa Bhasthi, and she and Mushtaq will share the £50,000 award. This will make Bhasthi the first Indian translator to win the award.
The Power of Narrative and the Road to Reconciliation
In an acceptance speech, Mushtaq said she was grateful to readers who had taken her words into their hearts. She thought about how every story, even the smallest, feeds into the larger experience of being human. Literature, she said, is one of the few 'sanctuaries' where people can penetrate another culture deeply, even if only for a few pages.
It is the second consecutive year that the Indian-origin writer has won the award after Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand, translated from Hindi, was also awarded in 2022. In doing so, Heart Lamp has made the world sit up and take notice of Kannada literature and inspired translations from South Asian languages to English.
Mushtaq's life closely resembles that of many of her fictional heroines — women who are trying to navigate religious strictures, and a patriarchal culture, that have little patience for them. Her private difficulties have informed her writing, finding expression in the muted determination of women existing at the edges.
Behind the Words, Life and Struggle
For Mushtaq, he grew up in a small town in Karnataka, in a Muslim community. She learnt the Quran in Urdu; however, after the death of her mother, she was sent to a convent school by her father and to a Kannada medium school. Kannada, which was alien to her, later turned out to be the language of her literary utterance.
She had taken to writing at an early age and went on to attend college, as most of her contemporaries married young. She published her first story after marrying a man of her choice at 26. But the first years of her marriage were fraught with emotional and mental challenges. She has been candid about her experiences, about having postpartum depression at 29, and about the pressure she faced from friends and family to stop making art in order to be more domestic.
Ponnamma attempted immolation upon herself when her husband prevented her, which was a deep emotional moment in her life. It was that incident that changed things for her, leading her to find her voice and purpose again through writing.
The characters in Heart Lamp carry this same spirit of resistance. They're not just women who suffer in silence but women who stand up, hold their ground, and stand up and demand to be heard in quiet and powerful ways. Mushtaq resists the urge to flatten her characters into easy symbols; rather, they are rendered as actual women grappling with complicated circumstances.
She also worked as a local tabloid reporter and was active in the Bandaya movement, which sought to highlight social and economic injustices through literature. She later abandoned the trade for a career in law to support her family, while writing on her off time.
Unblinking Voice On the Inside.. and the Outside Feature A Bold New Pair of Eyes on Injustice
Mushtaq's work has been both praised and criticized. In 2000, she publicly supported the right of Muslim women to be allowed to pray in mosques. This resulted in threats, a fatwa attempting to be placed on her, and an attempted knife attack that her husband prevented. Risking it all, however, she refused to give in, still broaching taboo topics in her writing.
She has never hesitated to criticize the hardline interpretation of religion and patriarchal authority. As she shared, "We're growing as a society, but really, nothing has changed in terms of the basic struggles of women, and all the marginalised sections of society.
She has been the recipient of several awards over the years, such as the Karnataka Sahitya Academy Award, the Daana Chintamani Attimabbe Award. In 2024, another of her works, Haseena and Other Stories, a selection of her five story collections from 1990 to 2012 in translation, won the PEN Translation Prize.
By her sincere story-telling and pursuit of the truth, Banu Mushtaq has not only made literary history, she has also helped to inspire a whole new level of acknowledgment of regional voices as well as of the power inherent in them.
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