On Tuesday 20 May, Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp was announced as the winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize, the world’s most influential award for translated fiction, at a ceremony in Tate Modern, London.
The announcement was made by the bestselling Booker Prize-longlisted author Max Porter, chair of the 2025 judges. The £50,000 prize money from the award, which honours the crucial task of translation, is split equally between the author and the translator.
Among the list of books shortlisted this year for this prize were On the Calculation of Volume I, Small Boat, Under the Eye of the Big Bird, Perfection, Heart Lamp, and A Leopard-Skin Hat.
Heart Lamp emerged as the winning book this year and is the first collection of short stories to be awarded the prize. The book—written by Banu Mushtaq, and translated by Deepa Bhasthi—is the first novel written in Kannada, a language that is thought to be spoken by over 65 million people, nominated for the prize.
Deepa Bhasthi is the first Indian translator to win the International Booker Prize. Other Stories, an independent publisher located in Sheffield, also takes home the award for the first time.
The 12 stories in Heart Lamp, which were written between 1990 and 2023, describe the lives of women and girls in southern India’s patriarchal societies. Mushtaq, a notable advocate for women’s rights and a protester against caste and religious discrimination in India, is a lawyer and a significant voice in progressive Kannada writing. She was motivated to create the stories by the experiences of women who sought her assistance.
After Geetanjali Shree in 2022, Mushtaq is the second Indian writer to win the International Booker Prize.
Words by C. Sharmishtha
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