Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp, translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi, has become the first Kannada language book to win the International Booker Prize.
Published as ‘Hridaya Deepa’ in Kannada, Heart Lamp is a collection of short stories written over 32 years, which ‘chronicles the resilience, resistance, wit, and sisterhood’ of Muslim women navigating caste and patriarchy in Southern India.
“My stories are about women – how religion, society, and politics demand unquestioning obedience from them, and in doing so, inflict inhumane cruelty upon them, turning them into mere subordinates,” Mushtaq said in an interview with the Booker Prize.
Mushtaq, an activist, lawyer and journalist from Hassan, Karnataka, rose to prominence as one of the few Muslim women part of the Bandaya Sahitya literary movement of the 1970s and 80s, addressing caste and class injustices through her writing.
The winning anthology keenly observes religious and patriarchal constraints, drawing from the experiences of herself and women around her; the title story, Heart Lamp, is based on a time in her own marriage when she dowsed herself in petrol, her husband begging her to stop and placing their child at her feet.
“The daily incidents reported in media and the personal experiences I have endured have been my inspiration. The pain, suffering, and helpless lives of these women create a deep emotional response within me, compelling me to write,” Mushtaq says.
She is known for the ‘quiet power’ of her words, presenting the unnoticed lives of Muslim women and the defiance with which they face their hardships.
“These aren’t stories that defend or exoticise Muslim life. They’re told with full awareness of its contradictions and textures,” says a reviewer in Indian Express.
Max Porter, chair of the 2025 International Booker Prize judges, says the book was loved by the panel from their first reading.
“Heart Lamp is something genuinely new for English readers. A radical translation which ruffles language, to create new textures in a plurality of Englishes. It challenges and expands our understanding of translation,” he said in a statement.
“These beautiful, busy, life-affirming stories rise from Kannada, interspersed with the extraordinary socio-political richness of other languages and dialects. It speaks of women’s lives, reproductive rights, faith, caste, power and oppression.”
Deepa Bhasthi, the first Indian translator to win the prize, says she took extra care to understand the world explored in the book.
“I was very conscious of the fact that I knew very little about the community she places her stories in,” she says. “Thus, during the period I was working on the first draft, I found myself immersed in the very addictive world of Pakistani television dramas, music by old favourites like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Ali Sethi, Arooj Aftab and others, and I even took classes to learn the Urdu script. I suppose these things somehow helped me get under the skin of the stories and the language she uses.”
The International Booker prize rewards works of fiction written in any language, then translated to English, with the £50,000 prize money divided equally between author and translator.
“When one translates, the aim is to introduce the reader to new words, in this case, Kannada … I call it translating with an accent, which reminds the reader that they are reading a work set in another culture, without exoticising it, of course. So, the English in Heart Lamp is an English with a very deliberate Kannada hum to it,” Bhasthi told Scroll.in.
Congratulations to Kannada writer Banu Mushtaq on winning the International Booker Prize for her short story collection ‘Heart Lamp’ – https://t.co/9IfaGqqSYx Another triumph for Indian writing, a celebration of diversity & of the writer’s belief that “no story is ever too small”
— Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) May 21, 2025
Mushtaq is the second Indian author to win the prize, following Geetanjali Shree’s 2022 win for Tomb of Sand, a Hindi-language novel following an octogenarian determined to challenge conventions.
This year’s shortlistees were A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre translated by Mark Hutchinson, Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico translated by Sophie Hughes, Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix translated by Helen Stevenson, On The Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle translated by Barbara J. Haveland, and Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami translated by Asa Yoneda.
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