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In a landmark moment for Indian literature, writer, activist, and lawyer Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp has become the first-ever Kannada title to win the prestigious International Booker Prize. The GBP (British pound sterling) 50,000 award was presented at a ceremony at the Tate Modern in London on Tuesday night, May 20.
Mushtaq shared the honour with translator Deepa Bhasthi, who rendered the collection of 12 short stories from Kannada into English. The jury praised the book for its “witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating” portrayal of women’s lives in patriarchal southern Indian communities.
“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,” Mushtaq said while accepting the award. “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.”
Heart Lamp is the first short story collection to win the International Booker. Spanning over three decades from 1990 to 2023, the stories chronicle the resilience, wit, resistance, and sisterhood of Muslim women in southern India. The collection was curated by Bhasthi to preserve the multilingual spirit of southern India, retaining words in Urdu and Arabic as spoken by the characters.
Chair of the 2025 judging panel, author Max Porter, described the book as "A radical translation which ruffles language, to create new textures in a plurality of Englishes. It challenges and expands our understanding of translation," he said.
Administrator of the prize, Fiammetta Rocco, said the collection should be read by people across the globe. "Heart Lamp, stories written by a great advocate of women's rights over three decades and translated with sympathy and ingenuity, should be read by men and women all over the world. The book speaks to our times, and to the ways in which many are silenced."
The annual International Booker Prize celebrates the best works of long-form fiction or short story collections translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland. The prize money is split equally between author and translator, with Mushtaq and Bhasthi receiving GBP 25,000 each. The five other shortlisted titles received GBP 5,000 apiece.
This win marks the second time an Indian title has won the prize, following the 2022 victory of Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell. Tamil author Perumal Murugan’s Pyre, translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan, was longlisted in 2023.
The other finalists for the 2025 International Booker Prize included On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland; Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated from French by Helen Stevenson; Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda; Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes; and A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson.
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