At a live ceremony for the International Booker Prize 2025 being held at the Tate Modern in London May 20, 2025, Heart Lamp a short stories collection by Banu Mushtaq became the e first short-story collection to win the influential award for translated fiction. The £50,000 prize is split 50:50 between Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi, giving each equal recognition.

Mushtaq becomes the second Indian writer to win the International Booker Prize after Gitanjali Shri in 2022, whose book, Ret Samadhi was written in Hindi, and translated as, The Tomb of Sand. Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp is the first to be translated from Kannada, a language spoken by an estimated 65 million people Booker Prize Foundation noted. And translator Bhashti becomes the first Indian translator to win the International Booker Prize.

Announcing Heart Lamp as winner, Chair of the 2025 judges Max Porter said, “Heart Lamp is something genuinely new for English readers. A radical translation which ruffles language, to create new textures in a plurality of Englishes. It challenges and expands our understanding of translation.”

Porter went on to say, “These beautiful, busy, life-affirming stories rise from Kannada, interspersed with the extraordinary socio-political richness of other languages and dialects. It speaks of women’s lives, reproductive rights, faith, caste, power and oppression.”

In the process of judging from the shortlist, Porter added, “This was the book the judges really loved, right from our first reading. It’s been a joy to listen to the evolving appreciation of these stories from the different perspectives of the jury. We are thrilled to share this timely and exciting winner of the International Booker Prize 2025 with readers around the world.”

“My stories are about women – how religion, society, and politics demand unquestioning obedience from them, and in doing so, inflict inhumane cruelty upon them, turning them into mere subordinates. The daily incidents reported in the media and the personal experiences I have endured have been my inspiration. The pain, suffering, and helpless lives of these women create a deep emotional response within me. I do not engage in extensive research; my heart itself is my field of study,” Mushtaq is quoted saying

The 12 short stories in the Heart Lamp chronicle the everyday lives of women and girls in “patriarchal communities” in southern India, written by an author who is herself a champion of women’s rights, and a lawyer, who protested caste and religious oppression, the Booker Prize Foundation said in its announcement. The stories in Heart Lamp were published in Kannada between 1990 and 2023, though Mushtaq has been writing since the 1970s.

“Mushtaq’s writing is at once witty, vivid, moving and excoriating, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style,” the Booker Prize Foundation said, adding, “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 she emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature.”

Mushtaq was part of the Bandaya Sahitya movement which gave rise to many Dalit and Muslim writers. She is the author of six short-story collections, a novel, an essay collection and a poetry collection. Hearts Lamp is the first full-length translation of her work.

Mushtaq’s translator Deepa Bhasthi is a writer and literary translator based in Kodagu, southern India. She has many published columns, essays and cultural criticism in India and internationally. Her published translations from Kannada include a novel by Kota Shivarama Karanth and a collection of short stories by Kodagina Gouramma.

Bhasthi’s translation of Banu Mushtaq’s stories was a winner of English PEN’s ‘PEN Translates’ award. She has called her process for Heart Lamp, ‘translating with an accent’.

“For me, translation is an instinctive practice, and each book demands a completely different process. With Banu’s stories, I first read all the fiction she had published before I narrowed it down to the ones that are in Heart Lamp. I was lucky to have a free hand in choosing what stories I wanted to work with, and Banu did not interfere with the organised chaotic way I went about it,” Bhashti says.

Several Indians have won various Booker prizes over the years including V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Aravind Adiga, and Kiran Desai.

(Used under special arrangement with NIT)

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