In a historic moment for Indian literature, writer, activist, and lawyer Bhanu Mushtaq’s ‘Heart Lamp’ has become the first ever Kannada title to win the prestigious International Booker Prize. The award, worth GBP 50,000, was presented at a ceremony at the Tate Modern in London on Tuesday night, May 20, 2025.
Author and translator shares the honour
Mushtaq shares this accolade with translator Deep Bhasti, who translated the collection of 12 short stories from Kannada into English. The jury commended the book for its “witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating” portrayal of women’s lives in patriarchal southern Indian communities.
“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,” Mushtaq said in her acceptance speech. “In a world that often tries to divide us, literature remains one of the last sacred spaces where we can live inside each other’s minds, if only for a few pages.”
About ‘Heart Lamp’
Heart Lamp is the first short story collection to win the International Booker. Spanning over three decades (1990–2023), the stories chronicle the resilience, wit, resistance, and sisterhood of Muslim women in southern India. Translator Deepa Bhasthi curated the collection to preserve the region’s multilingual spirit, retaining Urdu and Arabic words as spoken by the characters.
Jury and prize administrator’s praise
- Max Porter, the chair of the 2025 judging panel, described the translation as “a radical translation that ruffles language to create new textures in a plurality of Englishes. It challenges and expands our understanding of translation.”
- Fiammetta Rocco, the administrator of the prize, emphasized the book’s global relevance: “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.”
About the International Booker Prize
The International Booker Prize celebrates the best works of long-form fiction or short story collections translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland. The prize money is split equally between the author and translator, with Mushtaq and Bhasthi each receiving GBP 25,000. The five other shortlisted titles received GBP 5,000 each.
Previous Indian winners and finalists
- This marks the second instance of an Indian-origin person winning the award after Geetanjali Shree’s winning in 2022 for her Hindi novel Tomb of Sand, which was infamously translated to English by Daisy Rockwell.
- 2023 marked the year when Tamil author Perumal Murugan’s Pyre, translated by Aniruddan Vasudevan, received a longlist nomination.
2025 shortlist
The other finalists for the 2025 International Booker Prize were
- the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle (Danish, tr. Barbara J. Haveland)
- Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix (French, tr. Helen Stevenson)
- Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami (Japanese, tr. Asa Yoneda)
- Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico (Italian, tr. Sophie Hughes)
- A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre (French, tr. Mark Hutchinson)