HEART LAMP Wins the International Booker Prize
Author Banu Mushtaq © Alberto Pezzali/AP
On Tuesday, May 20, HEART LAMP (India Penguin) by Banu Mushtak, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, won the 2025 International Booker Prize. The winning title, a collection of 12 short stories which exquisitely capture the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India, is the first collection of short stories to be awarded the prize and the first winner originally written in Kannada.
The winner was announced by bestselling Booker Prize-longlisted author Max Porter, Chair of the judges, at a ceremony at London’s Tate Modern.
The International Booker Prize, the world’s most influential award for translated fiction, is awarded annually, celebrating the best works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland. The prize recognizes the vital work of translation, with the £50,000 prize money divided equally between the author and the translator.
In HEART LAMP, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada, 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 India’s most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come.