The International Booker Prize 2025 To The First Collection Of Short Stories
- Erkiulis
- Jun 5
- 1 min read
The International Booker Prize, the world’s most influential award for translated fiction, has already announced its winner 2025. This year it is Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi.
Heart Lamp is the first collection of short stories to be awarded the prize. Written between 1990 and 2023, Heart Lamp’s 12 stories chronicle the lives of women and girls in patriarchal communities in southern India. This is the first book translated from Kannada, a language spoken by an estimated 65 million people, to be nominated for the prize.
According to Max Porter, International Booker Prize 2025 Chair of judges, "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. 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."
Banu Mushtaq, a lawyer and major voice within progressive Kannada literature, is a prominent champion of women’s rights and a protester against caste and religious oppression in India, and was inspired to write the stories by the experiences of women who came to her seeking help. She becomes the second Indian author to win the International Booker Prize after Geetanjali Shree in 2022.
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