Banu Mushtaq's short story collection Heart Lamp, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, was announced last night as the 2025 winner of the International Booker Prize! This is the first time a short story collection has won the prestigious award, which celebrates international fiction translated into English.
Max Porter, the Chair of judges for the International Booker Prize 2025, says:
‘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. 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.'
The Winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize
Heart Lamp
Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi
In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq's years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women's rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression.
Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, 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 Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well as India's most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come.
Available from 26 May
As the 2025 prize winners, Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi will receive £50,000 in prize money, divided equally between them. You can read more about the International Booker Prize here, or revisit the other shortlisted titles here.
