Banu Mushtaq’s 'Heart Lamp' brings International Booker Prize to Kannada literature

The prestigious International Booker Prize has been awarded to writer, activist, and lawyer Banu Mushtaq for her short story collection Heart Lamp. The book is the first Kannada title to win the coveted £50,000 International Booker Prize in London.

Mushtaq described her win as a victory for diversity as she collected the prize on Tuesday night at a ceremony at Tate Modern along with her translator Deepa Bhasthi, who translated the title from Kannada to English.

The winning collection of 12 short stories chronicles the resilience, resistance, wit, and sisterhood of everyday women in patriarchal communities in southern India, vividly brought to life through a rich tradition of oral storytelling.

Shortlisted among six worldwide titles, Mushtaq’s work appealed to the judges for its “witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating” style of capturing portraits of family and community tensions. “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,” said Mushtaq. 

“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,” she said.

Translator Bhashti added: “What a beautiful win this is for my beautiful language.” Max Porter, International Booker Prize 2025 Chair of judges, described the winning title as 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,” he said. “This was the book the judges really loved, right from our first reading. It’s been a joy to listen to the evolving appreciation of these stories from the different perspectives of the jury. We are thrilled to share this timely and exciting winner of the International Booker Prize 2025 with readers around the world,” he said.

The tales in ‘Heart Lamp’, the first collection of short stories to win the prize, were written by Mushtaq over a period of over 30 years, from 1990 to 2023. They were selected and curated by Bhasthi, who was keen to preserve the multilingual nature of southern India.

When the characters use Urdu or Arabic words in conversation, these are left in the original, reproducing the unique rhythms of spoken language.

Fiammetta Rocco, Administrator of the International Booker Prize, added: “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. “In a divided world, a younger generation is increasingly connecting with global stories that have been skilfully reworked for English-language readers through the art of translation.”

The annual prize celebrates the best works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between May 2024 and April 2025.

The other five books on the shortlist 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.

Each shortlisted title is awarded a prize of GBP 5,000, shared between the author and translator, and the winning prize money is split between Mushtaq and Bhashti, who receive GBP 25,000 each.

It marks the second win for an Indian title since 2022, when Geetanjali Shree and translator Daisy Rockwell won the coveted prize for the first-ever Hindi novel ‘Tomb of Sand’. Perumal Murugan’s Tamil novel ‘Pyre’, translated into English by Aniruddhan Vasudevan, made it to the longlist in 2023.