- Wednesday, May 21, 2025
Featuring 12 short stories written by Mushtaq over three decades, ‘Heart Lamp’ captures the hardships of Muslim women living in southern India
By: India Weekly
KANNADA writer, activist and lawyer Banu Mushtaq’s short story collection ‘Heart Lamp’ has won coveted £50,000 International Booker Prize in London.
It is the first book written in the Kannada language to win the prestigious prize.
Featuring 12 short stories written by Mushtaq over three decades from 1990 to 2023, ‘Heart Lamp’ poignantly captures the hardships of Muslim women living in southern India.
It chronicles the resilience, resistance, wit, and sisterhood of everyday women in patriarchal communities, and it is vividly brought to life through a rich tradition of oral storytelling.
Mushtaq described her win as a victory for diversity as she collected the prize on Tuesday night at a ceremony at Tate Modern along with her translator Deepa Bhasthi, who translated the short story collection to English.
Shortlisted among six worldwide titles, Mushtaq’s work appealed to the judges for its “witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating” style of capturing portraits of family and community tensions.
“This book was born from the belief that no story is ever small, that in the tapestry of human experience every thread holds the weight of the whole,” said Mushtaq.
“In a world that often tries to divide us, literature remains one of the lost sacred spaces where we can live inside each other’s minds, if only for a few pages,” she said.
Translator Bhashti added: “What a beautiful win this is for my beautiful language.”
Max Porter, International Booker Prize 2025 Chair of judges, described the winning title as something genuinely new for English readers.
“A radical translation which ruffles language, to create new textures in a plurality of English. It challenges and expands our understanding of translation,” he said.
“This was the book the judges really loved, right from our first reading. It’s been a joy to listen to the evolving appreciation of these stories from the different perspectives of the jury. We are thrilled to share this timely and exciting winner of the International Booker Prize 2025 with readers around the world,” he said.
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.
The other five books on the shortlist included: ‘On the Calculation of Volume I’ by Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland; ‘Small Boat’ by Vincent Delecroix, translated from French by Helen Stevenson; ‘Under the Eye of the Big Bird’ by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda; ‘Perfection’ by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes; and ‘A Leopard-Skin Hat’ by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson.
Mushtaq’s win comes off the back of Geetanjali Shree’s ‘Ret Samadhi’ or ‘Tomb of Sand’ – translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell – winning the prize in 2022.
Perumal Murugan’s Tamil novel ‘Pyre’, translated into English by Aniruddhan Vasudevan, made it to the longlist in 2023.
