Banu Mushtaq's Heart Lamp Wins International Booker Prize 2025
London: Karnataka-based writer, activist, and lawyer Banu Mushtaq has won the acclaimed International Booker Prize for her short story collection, Heart Lamp on Tuesday night. The book was translated from Kannada to English by Deepa Bhasthi.
Mushtaq described her win as a victory for diversity. She along with Bhasthi collected the prize at a ceremony at Tate Modern.
image:thebookerprizes.com
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Winning the prize in the translated fiction category, Heart Lamp became the first short story to bag the title, and Mushtaq became the first Kannada writer to clinch the award. The work, a collection of 12 stories, deals with the lives of Muslim women in the patriarchal communities of South India, specifically Karnataka.
Author Max Porter, who chaired the 2025 judging panel, said: “Heart Lamp is something genuinely new for English readers.” “A radical translation that ruffles language to create new textures in a plurality of Englishes. It challenges and expands our understanding of translation,” he added.
Watch the moment Heart Lamp was announced as the winner of the #InternationalBooker2025.
Discover the book: https://t.co/zwWnDmkLV4@andothertweets pic.twitter.com/2NdxGkiay3
— The Booker Prizes (@TheBookerPrizes) May 20, 2025
After receiving the award Mushtaq said: “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.”
“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 added.
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“What a beautiful win this is for my beautiful language,” Bhasthi said.
Heart Lamp is the second Indian book to win the coveted title, after Geetanjali Shree and translator Daisy Rockwell won the 2022 award for Tomb of Sand (Ret Samadhi). In 2023, Perumal Murugan’s Tamil novel Pyre, translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan came in the longlist.
