Screengrab of the book shared during announcement of the winner (X/TheBookerPrizes/X)
Karnataka-based activist writer Banu Mushtaq’s short story collection Heart Lamp has won the prestigious International Booker prize for the year 2025 in London, under the translated fiction category, making it the first short story to bag the award.
Mushtaq’s work has 12 stories narrating the lives of women in the patriarchal communities of South India. The book was defined by the chair of judges Max Porter as “something genuinely new for English readers: a radical translation” of “beautiful, busy, life-affirming stories”, The Guardian reported.
Deepa Bhasthi who translated the work from Kannada to English was present along with Mushtaq at Tate Modern to collect the prize.
Originally written in Kannada, the state language of Karnataka— the book delves into details set within the Bandaya (rebel) tradition that emerged after Emergency. Bandaya literature foregrounded caste and class with raw urgency, but Mushtaq — one of the few Muslim women in that orbit — turns her gaze inward, to the gendered boundaries maintained by religious conservatism.
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