Banu Mushtaq

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 by And Other Stories press in 2025, from which “Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord!” is excerpted.