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The IB Prize winner

The stories are Wharton-esque

The author is a native Kannada speaker, and also activist, lawyer and feminist. Kannada has 60 million speakers, and is older than Hindi.

These stories do not directly challenge cultural norms. The characters all exist in their Muslim Indian world and accept their realities, including their economic reality, as the natural order. It's within this mindset that BM‘s feminism lays its hands.

Heart Lamp is a worthy winner of the International Booker Prize 2025.

Translated from Kannada, this is a collection of short stories centring the lives of Muslim women in India.

Most of them are splendid and showcase not only a warm writing talent, but also the layers of pain and hardship suffered in a patriarchal society.

There were only two that I felt lacked a point or direction.

Contemplative, human, heart-breaking.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Tender & vulnerable, Heart Lamp explores the lives of Muslim women in rural Karnataka. But it isn‘t just a story of one community - rather it is the story of girls and women - the forced silences, the harsh hurts, the piercing dismissals and the painful denials that we women are made to confront, at the hands of the patriarchal societies we inhabit and the men in our lives.

These stories may seem simple - but they are real and universal.

I'm only 2 stories in, but they've both been brilliant so far.

Well my prediction couldn't have been more wrong!

Well done to Banu Mushtaq, Deepa Bhasthi and Heart Lamp for winning the International Booker Prize 2025!

I shall be giving it a read and reviewing it on my channel. If you want to hear my thoughts on the other nominees, I do a brief rundown in my prediction vid.

Every book on the shortlist was good 😊

Hey, you've read it?

So happy and proud this book won the Booker Prize 2025!

My country, my region and my beloved native language Kannada.

One of the oldest languages in the world - so glad other readers can get a taste of our language!

A poignant set of stories that explore the day to day lives of Muslim women ; and also capture the shared cultural legacies of Indian and South Asian women!

Congrats to Mushtaq's Heart Lamp for winning the International Booker Prize! I have stopped following literary prize news the past couple of years for several reasons & it's something outside of the box to make me pay attention (ie: Everett's overdue Pulitzer this year) & now a short story collection! Although I have not read Mushtaq, some of the best fiction I have read over the past few years has been story collections & this is long overdue!

Another book I‘ve been reading from the International #Booker longlist. Originally written in Kannadan, it‘s a muslim-Indian perspective. It‘s been terrific so far. #IB2025