Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi win the International Booker Prize for fiction in translation

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Heart Lamp, a collection of short stories written by Banu Mushtaq and translated by Deepa Bhasthi, has won the 2025 International Booker Prize. It is the first time a short-story collection has won the award, which is open to fiction translated into English from any language and published in the UK or Ireland.

Max Porter, chair of the judges, described the book as “a radical translation which ruffles language, to create new textures in a plurality of Englishes”. Heart Lamp is the first translation from Kannada, the official language of Mushtaq’s home state of Karnataka in south-western India, to win the £50,000 prize, which is shared equally between author and translator.

Mushtaq is a long-established lawyer and advocate for women’s rights in Muslim communities, and the 12 stories in Heart Lamp — the first full book of her work to be translated into English — capture everyday lives in Karnataka, often with women and children at their centre.

Her writing emerged from Bandaya Sahitya, a literary movement of the 1970s and ’80s that protested against the male and upper-caste dominance of publishing in the Kannada language, and she has published several short story collections, essays, a novel and poetry. Bhasthi, who both selected and translated the stories in Heart Lamp, chose work originally published from 1990 to 2023 to introduce English-speaking readers to a range of Mushtaq’s work. The FT’s reviewer highlighted the “compassion and dark humour” of Mushtaq’s storytelling.

Porter said that the judges, who also included the poet and director Caleb Femi, musician Beth Orton, publishing director Sana Goyal and author and translator Anton Hur, agreed on their choice on Monday after a six-hour meeting at the start of which “no book was ruled out”. The other five shortlisted works included a satirical take on millennial life in Berlin, a fragmented study of a childhood friend, a reimagining of a small boat tragedy in the English Channel, the story of a woman who wakes up on the same day, every day, and a speculative novel in which the human race is at risk of extinction.

Heart Lamp was published in April in the UK by And Other Stories, a Sheffield-based independent publisher whose success is another first for this year’s prize.

Maria Crawford is the FT’s deputy books editor

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