Heart Lamp, written by Banu Mushtaq and translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, has been announced as the winner of the International Booker Prize 2025.
Mushtaq’s novel is the first collection of short stories to win the prize – written over 30 years, the 12 stories
chronicle the lives of women in patriarchal communities in southern India. It also marks the first winner of the International Booker Prize to be translated from Kannada, a major language spoken by an estimated 65 million people.
Inspired to write the stories by those who came to her seeking help, Mushtaq said: ‘The pain, suffering, and helpless lives of these women create a deep emotional response within me, compelling me to write.’
More about the book
In a collection of 12 short stories, Heart Lamp chronicles the everyday lives of women and girls in patriarchal communities in southern India.
Originally published in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, Mushtaq’s portraits of family and community tensions testify to her years tirelessly championing women’s rights and protesting all forms of caste and religious oppression.
Mushtaq’s writing is at once witty, vivid, moving and excoriating, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. 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 she emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature.
The winner was announced by Eleanor Wachtel, Chair of the 2024 judges, at a ceremony sponsored by Maison Valentino. It was held at London’s Tate Modern and hosted by academic and broadcaster Shahidha Bari. The £50,000 prize is split equally between author Jenny Erpenbeck and translator Michael Hofmann, giving each equal recognition.
What the judges thought
Max Porter, International Booker Prize Chair of judges, 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.
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
About the Author & Translator
Author
Banu Mushtaq is a writer, activist and lawyer in the state of Karnataka, southern India. Mushtaq began writing within the progressive protest literary circles in southwestern India in the 1970s and 1980s: critical of the caste and class system, the Bandaya Sahitya movement gave rise to influential Dalit and Muslim writers, of whom Mushtaq was one of the few women. She is the author of six short story collections, a novel, an essay collection and a poetry collection. She writes in Kannada and has won major awards for her literary works, including the Karnataka Sahitya Academy and the Daana Chintamani Attimabbe awards. Her International Booker Prize 2025 winning book Heart Lamp is the first book-length translation of her work into English, having been translated into Urdu, Hindi, Tamil and Malayalam.
On her book, she said:
My stories are about women – how religion, society, and politics demand unquestioning obedience from them, and in doing so, inflict inhumane cruelty upon them, turning them into mere subordinates. The daily incidents reported in media and the personal experiences I have endured have been my inspiration. The pain, suffering, and helpless lives of these women create a deep emotional response within me, compelling me to write.
_Stories for the Heart Lamp collection were chosen from around 50 stories in six story collections I wrote between 1990 and later. Usually, there will be a single draft, and the second one will be a final copy. I do not engage in extensive research; my heart itself is my field of study. The more intensely the incidents affect me, the more deeply and emotionally I write.’
Translator
Deepa Bhasthi is a writer and literary translator based in Kodagu, southern India. Bhasthi’s columns, essays and cultural criticism have been published in India and internationally. Her published translations from Kannada include a novel by Kota Shivarama Karanth and a collection of short stories by Kodagina Gouramma. Her translation of Mushtaq’s stories won a PEN Presents award in 2024, a scheme from English PEN designed to support and showcase sample translations, giving UK publishers access to titles from underrepresented languages and regions. They were collected as the International Booker Prize 2025 winning book Heart Lamp.
On the book, she said:
For me, translation is an instinctive practice in many ways, and I have found that each book demands a completely different process. With Banu’s stories, I first read all the fiction she had published before I narrowed it down to the ones that are in Heart Lamp. I was lucky to have a free hand in choosing what stories I wanted to work with, and Banu did not interfere with the organised chaotic way I went about it.
I was very conscious of the fact that I knew very little about the community she places her stories in. Thus, during the period I was working on the first draft, I found myself immersed in the very addictive world of Pakistani television dramas, music by old favourites like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Ali Sethi, Arooj Aftab and others, and I even took classes to learn the Urdu script. I suppose these things somehow helped me get under the skin of the stories and the language she uses.
Resources
Everything you need to know about Heart Lamp
Watch Ambika Mod read from Heart Lamp
Watch an interview with Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi, author and translator of Heart Lamp
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