• Karnataka-based writer, activist and lawyer Banu Mushtaq’s short story collection ‘Heart Lamp’, translated from Kannada to English by Deepa Bhasthi, won the International Booker Prize 2025 on May 20.

• Mushtaq collected the prize at a ceremony at Tate Modern in London along with Deepa Bhasthi.

• 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.

• Mushtaq 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 award.

• Deepa Bhasthi is a writer and literary translator based in Kodagu, Karnataka. She became the first Indian translator to win the International Booker Prize.

• ‘Heart Lamp’ is the first book-length translation of Mushtaq’s work into English.

• It is the first Kannada title to win the £50,000 International Booker Prize.

• In 2022, Geetanjali Shree and translator Daisy Rockwell won the coveted prize for Hindi novel ‘Tomb of Sand’.

What is the book about?

• The 12 stories in the book were published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, 

• Praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression.  

• Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it’s in her characters that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. 

• It was shortlisted among six worldwide titles.

The other five books shortlisted were: 

i) ‘On the Calculation of Volume I’ by Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland.

ii) ‘Small Boat’ by Vincent Delecroix, translated from French by Helen Stevenson.

iii) ‘Under the Eye of the Big Bird’ by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda.

iv) ‘Perfection’ by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes.

v) ‘A Leopard-Skin Hat’ by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson.

• Each shortlisted title is awarded a prize of £5,000 – shared between author and translator.

International Booker Prize

• The International Booker Prize, formerly known as the Man Booker International Prize, has been awarded since 2005.

• It is a sister prize to the Booker Prize, awarded to a novel written in English.

• It was initially a biennial prize for a body of work, and there was no stipulation that the work should be written in a language other than English. Early winners of the Man Booker International Prize therefore include Alice Munro, Lydia Davis and Philip Roth, as well as Ismail Kadare and Laszlo Krasznahorkai. 

• In 2015, the rules of the original Booker Prize expanded to allow writers of any nationality to enter — as long as their books were written in English and published in the UK — the International Prize evolved to become the mirror image of the English-language prize.

• Since then it has been awarded annually for a single book, written in another language and translated into English.

• The vital work of translators is celebrated, with the £50,000 prize money divided equally between the author and translator. Each shortlisted author and translator also receives £2,500.

• Novels and collections of short stories are both eligible.

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