Heart Lamp wins the International Booker Prize 2025
Banu Mushtaq's Heart Lamp, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, is the first short story collection to win the International Booker Prize.
Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, won the 2025 International Booker Prize, announced at Tate Modern in London on 20 May 2025. The £50,000 prize is shared equally between author and translator. The book is published in the UK by the independent press And Other Stories.
Heart Lamp is a selection of twelve stories written between 1990 and 2023 about the everyday lives of women and girls in patriarchal communities in southern India. Mushtaq is a lawyer and women's rights campaigner, and many of her characters draw on women she has met in that work. Bhasthi selected the stories as well as translating them.
It is the first short story collection to win the prize and the first winning book translated from Kannada. Bhasthi is the first Indian translator to win. The other shortlisted books were by Solvej Balle, Vincent Delecroix, Hiromi Kawakami, Vincenzo Latronico and Anne Serre.
The win is a useful corrective to the idea that short stories are a lesser form, or a harder sell, than the novel. It also shows how much a translator can shape a book: here the translator chose what English readers would see from three decades of work. For publishers, it is further evidence that small presses can find and carry books of this kind to the largest prizes.
Source: Publishers Weekly: 'Heart Lamp' wins 2025 International Booker Prize.