Banu Mushtaq wins International Booker Prize for Kannada short story collection ‘Heart Lamp’
NEW DELHI,MAY 21 : Writer, activist, and lawyer Banu Mushtaq has won the prestigious International Booker Prize 2025 for her short story collection Heart Lamp, the first-ever Kannada work to receive the award. The prize, worth GBP 50,000, was awarded during a ceremony at the Tate Modern in London, with Mushtaq sharing the stage, and the prize money with Deepa Bhasthi, who translated the book into English.
Celebrated for its “witty, vivid, colloquial, moving, and excoriating” portraits of women navigating patriarchal communities in southern India, Heart Lamp stood out among six shortlisted titles from around the world. The collection, twelve short stories written over three decades from 1990 to 2023, vividly captures the resilience, resistance, wit, and sisterhood of everyday women, deeply rooted in Karnataka’s rich oral storytelling traditions.
Chair of the 2025 judging panel, Max Porter, described the book as “a radical translation which ruffles language, to create new textures in a plurality of Englishes,” praising it as something “genuinely new for English readers.”
Mushtaq, sees the win as a victory for diversity and the power of storytelling, “This book was born from the belief that no story is ever small, that in the tapestry of human experience every thread holds the weight of the whole,” she said during her acceptance speech. “In a world that often tries to divide us, literature remains one of the lost sacred spaces where we can live inside each other’s minds, if only for a few pages.”
Deepa Bhasthi, whose translation was lauded for preserving the musicality and multilingual fabric of Karnataka’s everyday speech, called the win “a beautiful win for my beautiful language.” By retaining Kannada, Urdu, and Arabic words in the English version, she sought to maintain the book’s polyphonic spirit “None of us speaks ‘proper English’ in Karnataka,” Bhasthi remarked at a recent book event in Bengaluru’s Champaca Bookstore.
“We exist within multiple languages and dialects. I was translating for Indian readers — I wanted them to hear the deliberate Kannada hum behind it.”
Banu Mushtaq, author of ‘Heart Lamp’ left, and Deepa Bhasthi pose for photographers upon arrival for the International Booker Prize, in London, Tuesday, May 20, 2025
Banu Mushtaq, author of ‘Heart Lamp’ left, and Deepa Bhasthi pose for photographers upon arrival for the International Booker Prize, in London, Tuesday, May 20, 2025Photo | AP
In a recent inteview with TNIE, Mushtaq said, “I was asked to write about my contexts; and so I did. But at the same time, I didn’t want to be confined within the identity of the ‘Muslim woman’.”
Published by Penguin Random House India and priced at ₹399, Heart Lamp is the first short story collection ever to win the International Booker Prize and marks only the second Indian title to take home the award after Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand in 2022.
Fiammetta Rocco, Administrator of the International Booker Prize, called the book “a testament to the enduring fight for women’s rights, translated with sympathy and ingenuity,” urging that it “should be read by men and women all over the world.”
Alongside Heart Lamp, the 2025 shortlist included works translated from Danish, French, Japanese, and Italian. Each shortlisted title received GBP 5,000, shared between author and translator.
-PTI
