Heart Lamp
Selected Stories
- Auteur: Banu Mushtaq (India)
- Soort boek: verhalen
- Engelse vertaling: Deepa Bhasthi
- Uitgever: And Other Stories
- Verschijnt: 8 april 2025
- Omvang: 192 pagina’s
- Uitgave: paperback / ebook
- Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol
Banu Mushtaq Heart Lamp review, recensie en informatie
- “A significant presence in Kannada literature, Banu Mushtaq reveals the varied realities of contemporary women with rare talent and art. Deepa Bhasthi’s rich translation captures the original’s nuances of voice, context and experience, bringing this important work into English for new readers in India and internationally.” (PEN Presents Selection Panel)
Flaptekst van het boek van de Indiase Kannada schrijfster Banu Mushtaq
In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression.
Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it’s in her characters – the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost – that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well India’s most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come.
Banu Mushtaq is a writer, activist and lawyer in the state of Karnataka, southern India. Mushtaq began writing within the progressive protest literary circles in southwestern India in the 1970s and 1980s: critical of the caste and class system, the Bandaya Sahitya movement gave rise to influential Dalit and Muslim writers, of whom Mushtaq was one of the few women. She is the author of six short story collections, a novel, an essay collection and a poetry collection. She writes in Kannada and has won major awards for her literary works, including the Karnataka Sahitya Academy and the Daana Chintamani Attimabbe awards. Previously translated into Urdu, Hindi, Tamil and Malayalam, the first book-length translation of her work into English will be Heart Lamp: Selected Stories, to be published in 2025, while one of the stories from Heart Lamp has been published in the Paris Review.