Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi (And Other Stories/Consortium) has won the 2025 International Booker Prize, which honors "the best works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories translated into English and published in the U.K. and/or Ireland." The £50,000 (about $67,000) prize money is divided equally between authors and translators. Heart Lamp is the first collection of short stories to win the prize and is the first winner originally written in Kannada, one of the languages of India.
Organizers wrote: "In 12 stories, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. 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--the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost--that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well as India's most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come."