Indian author Banu Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi have jointly won the International Booker Prize 2025 for Heart Lamp, a short story collection chronicling the everyday realities and struggles of women in southern India over the past three decades.
The announcement came yesterday night (20 May) at London’s Tate Modern, where bestselling author and chair of the judging panel Max Porter revealed the winning title, selected from a shortlist of six, reports AP.
This is the first time the International Booker has been awarded to a short story collection. It is also a landmark win for Indian translation — Bhasthi is the first Indian translator and the ninth woman translator to win the prize since its current iteration began in 2016. Mushtaq becomes the sixth female author to receive the honour during this period.
Originally written in Kannada — spoken by roughly 65 million people, primarily in Karnataka — Heart Lamp spans stories written between 1990 and 2023. Bhasthi curated and translated the stories, aiming to retain the multilingual and socio-political nuances of the region.
“These beautiful, busy, life-affirming stories rise from Kannada, interspersed with the extraordinary socio-political richness of other languages and dialects,” said Porter. “They speak of women’s lives, reproductive rights, faith, caste, power, and oppression.”
Mushtaq, who is also a lawyer and activist, described her work as centring on how religion, politics and societal expectations impose obedience on women, often through deeply entrenched forms of cruelty.
The £50,000 (approximately $66,000) prize money will be shared equally between author and translator, with both also receiving a trophy.
The International Booker Prize is awarded annually for a work of fiction translated into English. It runs in parallel with the Booker Prize for English-language fiction, which is slated for announcement in the autumn.