“My heart itself is my field of study,” says Banu Mushtaq, whose Heart Lamp, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, has won the International Booker Prize 2025.
The first Kannada author to win the award, Mushtaq shares the honour and the £50,000 prize money with Bhasthi, the first ever Indian translator to win the International Booker Prize.
Heart Lamp, published by Penguin Random House India, is a collection of 12 short stories on Muslim and Dalit women that Mushtaq wrote from 1990 to 2023.
In her acceptance speech, Mushtaq said: “This is more than a personal achievement — it is an affirmation that we, as individuals and as a global community, can thrive when we embrace diversity, celebrate our differences and uplift one another.”
The book, she added, was her “love letter to the idea that no story is local, that a tale born under a banyan tree in my village can cast shadows as far as this stage tonight”.
The 77-year-old Mushtaq was born on April 3, 1948, in Hassan, Karnataka. Over a writing career that spans nearly 60 years, she has penned more than 65 stories in four languages — Kannada, Urdu, Arabic and Dakhni — engaging deeply with questions of faith, gender and defiance. She also has a novel, a collection of essays and several works of poetry to her credit.
Mushtaq’s stories have been translated into several languages, including Malayalam, Tamil, Punjabi, Urdu and English. In 1999, she received the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi Award. She has also won the Daana Chintamani Attimabbe Award.
“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. She was a victim of such subjugation herself and, like the character in the titular short story, Heart Lamp, had once tried to self-immolate to escape from marriage, motherhood and domesticity.
Apart from being an author, Mushtaq has been an activist, journalist, lawyer and even a politician. Mushtaq worked as a reporter at Lankesh Patrike, the influential tabloid edited by poet and writer P. Lankesh (father of the late activist and journalist, Gauri Lankesh). In 1983, she was elected to the Hassan City Municipal Council, where she served two consecutive terms as a council member.
In the 1980s, Mushtaq was actively involved in the Bandaya movement within Kannada literature, which was a powerful call for social and economic justice and brought to the fore marginalised voices, especially of Muslims and Dalits. This has left a lasting mark on her writing, says Mushtaq, adding that “overall, the social conditions of Karnataka shaped me”. In 2000, a fatwa was issued against her for championing women’s right to offer prayers in mosques.
An English translation of Mushtaq’s short story collection, Haseena and Other Stories, was awarded the English PEN Translation Award in 2024. Haseena and Other Stories, too, was translated by Bhasthi.
While most translators aim to be invisible, Max Porter, the chair of this year’s judges for the International Booker Prize, said that Bhasthi’s approach was the opposite and filled Heart Lamp with Indian expressions and ways of talking that gave the book “an extraordinary vibrancy”. Bhasthi said she hoped that this prize would generate “greater interest in reading, writing and translating more from and into… the magical languages we have in South Asia”.
This is the second time a work translated from an Indian language has won this prize. In 2022, Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, became the first work written originally in an Indian language to win the International Booker Prize. Perumal Murugan’s novel Pyre, translated from Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan, was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023.
Heart Lamp’s success is significant for more than one reason. For decades, contemporary Indian literature has been largely defined in the West by English-language fiction writers like Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Aravind Adiga, Amitav Ghosh and Anita Desai. But the 2022 recognition for Tomb of Sand changed this. Since then, HarperCollins India’s Perennial imprint has begun publishing around a dozen English-language translations a year. Penguin Random House India has translations from 16 of the 22 major Indian languages on its list, including Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, Tamil and Kannada.
As Mushtaq pointed out to the audience at her award ceremony, “Tonight… is a torch passed. May it light the way for more stories from unheard corners, more translations that defy borders, and more voices that remind us the universe fits inside every eye.”
Congratulatory messages for Mushtaq have been pouring in from several quarters.
In a post on X, Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah referred to her as “Kannada’s pride”. “Banu Mushtaq, who embodies and writes with the true values of this land, which is harmony, secularism, and brotherhood, has raised the flag of Kannada’s greatness on the international stage and brought honour to all of us. I wish that she continues to write with strength and spirit for a long time, spreading the essence of Kannada across the world,” Siddaramaiah posted.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi termed Mushtaq’s winning the International Booker Prize as “historic”.
Additional reporting by Cynthia Chandran