Banu Mushtaq

Banu Mushtaq was born on April 3, 1948, in Hassan, a city in what is now the state of Karnataka, into a Muslim family. At eight she started at a missionary school where classes were taught in Kannada, the state's language. It is the language she still writes in.

Writing came later. She began publishing around age 29, shortly after becoming a mother, and from the start her focus was women: wives, daughters and widows caught between the rules of family, religion and money. Before she was well known, she worked as a reporter for the newspaper Lankesh Patrike, spent a few months at All India Radio in Bengaluru and built a career as a lawyer. Time in courtrooms and newsrooms shows in the stories, which have a sharp eye for daily detail and little patience for speeches.

Since the 1980s she has been part of movements against fundamentalism and social injustice in Karnataka. In 2000, after she spoke up for Muslim women's right to pray in mosques, she and her family faced a social boycott announced in their community, an episode widely covered in the Indian press.

Over her career she has published six story collections, a novel, an essay collection and a book of poetry. In 1999 she received the Karnataka Sahitya Academy Award. One of her stories, Karinaagaragalu, became the film Hasina (2003), directed by Girish Kasaravalli, a leading name in Kannada cinema.

Her move beyond India came through translator Deepa Bhasthi. The selection Haseena and Other Stories came out in English in 2024, and the translation won a PEN Translates award. Next came Heart Lamp, twelve stories chosen from across her work. In May 2025 it won the International Booker Prize, with author and translator sharing the award. It was the first Kannada work ever listed for the prize, and the first story collection to win.

For newcomers, Heart Lamp is the natural way in: short stories with a dry sense of humor, about people trying to live with some dignity inside rules they never chose.