LONDON — The International Booker Prize has gone to a short-story collection for the first time — and to a language with no previous winner. “Heart Lamp”, by the Indian writer and activist Banu Mushtaq, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, won the 2025 award on Tuesday night.
The twelve stories, selected from across Mushtaq’s five decades of writing, portray the lives of Muslim women in southern India with wit and unflinching precision: marriages, mosques, kitchens and courts, in a society where the personal is unavoidably political. The judges, chaired by the novelist Max Porter, praised a book that is radical in its subject and quietly revolutionary in its craft.
Mushtaq, 77, is a lawyer and lifelong campaigner as well as a writer, a veteran of the movement for women’s rights within Karnataka’s Muslim community. She is the first author writing in Kannada — a language of some 40 million speakers — to win either of the Booker prizes.
Bhasthi, the translator, becomes the first Indian translator to win the International Booker; she has spoken of working not sentence by sentence but in what she calls translation with an accent, keeping Kannada’s cadences in the English. The £50,000 prize is divided between them.
The win continues the prize’s recent tilt towards firsts: first French winner in 2021, first Hindi in 2022, first Bulgarian in 2023, first German in 2024. Translated fiction, once the poor relation of British publishing, now reliably produces its most interesting nights.
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