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Activist. Lawyer. Journalist. Writer. International Booker Prize winner. On Tuesday, 20 May 2025, Kannada author Banu Mushtaq was announced as the winner of the International Booker Prize 2025 in a historic first for Kannada literature in translation. 'Heart Lamp', a collection of 12 short stories Mushtaq wrote between 1990 and 2023, is also the first collection of short fiction to win the prize. The stories, translated by Deepa Bhasti, chronicle the lives of women in patriarchal communities in southern India. Deepa Bhasti is the first Indian translator and Banu Mushtaq is the second Indian author (after Geetanjali Shree) to win the International Booker Prize, widely considered the world's most influential award for translated fiction. Mushtaq's win marks a watershed moment for Kannada literature — proving the sheer depth of riches India's regional literatures have to offer.
Heart Lamp is Banu Mushtaq's first English-language publication. A lawyer and women's rights activist long associated with Kannada civil society groups, Mushtaq said she was inspired to write the stories by those who came to her seeking help. "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," Mushtaq said in an interview for the Booker Prizes website.
The 12 stories in Heart Lamp, the first winner of the International Booker Prize to be translated from Kannada — a major Indian language spoken by an estimated 38 million as a first language among its 65 million speakers across the world — were written by Mushtaq over 30 years, from 1990 to 2023. They chronicle 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. From tough, stoic mothers to opinionated grandmothers, from cruel husbands to resilient children, the women in these stories endure great inequities and hardships but remain defiant.
"Heart Lamp is something genuinely new (...) 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."
Max Porter, Chair of the 2025 judges
The stories were selected and curated by translator Deepa Bhasthi, who described her process for Heart Lamp as "translating with an accent." Keen to preserve the multilingual nature of southern India, Bhasthi left the Urdu and Arabic words used in conversation as they appear in Mushtaq's original texts, reproducing the unique rhythms of spoken language.
"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," Bhasthi said in an interview for the Booker Prizes.
Both Mushtaq and Bhasthi were nominated for the International Booker Prize for the first time this year. They were announced as the winners of the £50,000 prize — equally divided between the author and the translator — by Max Porter, chair of the 2025 judges, at a ceremony in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London.
Watch Ambika Mod read an exerpt from 'Heart Lamp' here:
