- Heart Lamp is the first collection of short stories to win the prize – written over 30 years, the 12 stories chronicle the lives of women in patriarchal communities in southern India
- Lawyer and women’s rights activist Banu Mushtaq is the second Indian author to win the prize
- Deepa Bhasthi becomes the first Indian translator to win the prize, and describes her process for Heart Lamp as ‘translating with an accent’
- Heart Lamp is the first winner of the International Booker Prize to be translated from Kannada, a major language spoken by an estimated 65 million people
- Mushtaq was inspired to write the stories by those who came to her seeking help. She said: ‘The pain, suffering, and helpless lives of these women create a deep emotional response within me, compelling me to write.’
- The winning book, Heart Lamp, ‘is something genuinely new for English readers: a radical translation’ of ‘beautiful, busy, life-affirming stories’, according to Max Porter, Chair of the 2025 judges
- Sheffield-based independent publisher And Other Stories wins for the first time
- The red-carpet event at Tate Modern was attended by high-profile figures from across the cultural spectrum, including Omari Douglas, David Jonsson, Lily Fontaine (English Teacher), Natasha Khan (Bat for Lashes), Edmund de Waal, Emma Dabiri, Deborah Levy, Sir Ben Okri, Philippa Perry, DJ Jamz Supernova, Tanya Burr, and Samira Ahmed
‘Everything you need to know about the winner of the International Booker Prize 2025’
Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, is tonight, Tuesday, 20 May, named the 2025 winner of the International Booker Prize, the world’s most influential award for translated fiction. The winning book, the first collection of short stories to be awarded the prize, was announced by bestselling Booker Prize-longlisted author Max Porter, Chair of the 2025 judges, at a ceremony in the Turbine Hall at London’s Tate Modern. The International Booker Prize recognises the vital work of translation, with the £50,000 prize money divided equally between the author and the translator. Each received a trophy, presented by Porter.
Highlights of the evening included a special music performance of ‘Pass in Time’ by award-winning singer-songwriter Beth Orton, who is a judge for the 2025 prize, and a screening of six short films starring critically-acclaimed actors Lucy Boynton, Jamie Demetriou, Omari Douglas, Rosalind Eleazar, and Peter Serafinowicz performing extracts from the shortlisted books, with the winning title read by Ambika Mod. The announcement of the winner was shared with a global audience via a livestream on the Booker Prizes’ YouTube, Instagram and TikTok channels. A recording of the winner announcement, which was livestreamed on YouTube can be watched here. The event also featured red-carpet interviews with high-profile guests by comedian Suzi Ruffell, for the Booker Prizes’ social accounts.
The winning collection of 12 short stories chronicles the resilience, resistance, wit, and sisterhood of everyday women in patriarchal communities in southern India, vividly brought to life through a rich tradition of oral storytelling. From tough, stoic mothers to opinionated grandmothers, from cruel husbands to resilient children, the female characters in the stories endure great inequities and hardships but remain defiant.
Winning author Mushtaq, a lawyer and major voice within progressive Kannada literature, is a prominent champion of women’s rights and a protester against the caste and class system in India. She was inspired to write the stories by the experiences of women who came to her seeking help. The stories in Heart Lamp, which is the first winner of the International Booker Prize to be translated from Kannada, spoken by an estimated 65 million people – 38 million as a first language – were written by Mushtaq over a period of 30 + years, from 1990 to 2023. They were selected and curated by Bhasthi, who was keen to preserve the multi-lingual nature of southern India. When the characters use Urdu or Arabic words in conversation, these are left in the original, reproducing the unique rhythms of spoken language.
Max Porter, International Booker Prize 2025 Chair of judges, on the winning book:
‘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.
‘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.’
Fiammetta Rocco, Administrator of the International Booker Prize, adds:
‘Heart Lamp, stories written by a great advocate of women’s rights over three decades and translated with sympathy and ingenuity, should be read by men and women all over the world. The book speaks to our times, and to the ways in which many are silenced.
‘In a divided world, a younger generation is increasingly connecting with global stories that have been skilfully reworked for English-language readers through the art of translation. Since 2016, the International Booker Prize has promoted the world’s best writing in translation, and it’s been fantastic that this year’s nominated titles have come to life through our “A feast of fiction from around the world” campaign, which we’ve been delighted to see projected through new and returning collaborations with cultural venues, festivals, booksellers and content creators.
‘Next year the prize celebrates ten years in its current form, and I am optimistic that the anniversary will lead more people to discover and embrace great translated fiction.’
The winning book was chosen by the 2025 judging panel, chaired by Porter, which comprised: prize-winning poet, director and photographer Caleb Femi; writer and Publishing Director of Wasafiri Sana Goyal; author and International Booker Prize-shortlisted translator Anton Hur; as well as award-winning singer-songwriter Beth Orton. The judges were looking for the best work of long-form fiction or collection of short stories translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 May 2024 and 30 April 2025.
Both Mushtaq and Bhasthi were nominated for the International Booker Prize for the first time this year and Heart Lamp is Mushtaq’s first English-language publication. Mushtaq is the second Indian author to win the prize, and follows Geetanjali Shree who won in 2022 for Tomb of Sand, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell. Bhasthi is the first Indian translator to win the prize. Mushtaq is the sixth female author, with Bhasthi the ninth female translator, to be awarded the prize since it took on its current form in 2016.
At just over 200 pages long, Heart Lamp was the second longest book on a shortlist of slim books: four of the six shortlisted works are under 200 pages long, with Under the Eye of the Big Bird the longest, at 278 pages.
This is the first International Booker Prize win for Sheffield-based independent publisher And Other Stories, though their sixth nomination for the prize: The Remainder was shortlisted in 2019, Wretchedness was longlisted in 2021, Phenotypes was longlisted in 2022, Boulder was shortlisted in 2023 and The Book of Disappearance was longlisted in 2025, along with Heart Lamp.
What the winning author and translator said about the writing and translating Heart Lamp
‘Being a lawyer, activist and a writer, I witness [this] day to day, in my daily life, because so many women come to me. They have brought all the problems with them. They seek relief. But some of the women, they don’t know why they are suffering.’ – Banu Mushtaq in an interview for the International Booker Prize 2025 Shortlist Readings event at the Southbank Centre on Sunday, 18 May
‘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. 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.
‘Stories for the Heart Lamp collection were chosen from around 50 stories in six story collections I wrote between 1990 and later. Usually, there will be a single draft, and the second one will be a final copy. I do not engage in extensive research; my heart itself is my field of study. The more intensely the incidents affect me, the more deeply and emotionally I write.’ – Mushtaq in an interview for the Booker Prizes website
‘For me, translation is an instinctive practice in many ways, and I have found that each book demands a completely different process. With Banu’s stories, I first read all the fiction she had published before I narrowed it down to the ones that are in Heart Lamp. I was lucky to have a free hand in choosing what stories I wanted to work with, and Banu did not interfere with the organised chaotic way I went about it.
‘I was very conscious of the fact that I knew very little about the community she places her stories in. 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.’ – Deepa Bhasthi in an interview for the Booker Prizes website
‘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’ – Deepa Bhasthi in an interview with Scroll.in
