Banu Mushtaq

Banu Mushtaq is a writer, activist, and lawyer from Karnataka, southern India. Banu 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. The first book-length translation of her work into English was Heart Lamp: Selected Stories, which won the 2025 International Booker Prize.