Banu Mushtaq wins International Booker Prize for Kannada brief story assortment ‘Heart Lamp’-OxBig News Network

Writer, activist and lawyer Banu Mushtaq’s brief story assortment ‘Heart Lamp’ has grow to be the primary Kannada title to win the coveted GBP 50,000 International Booker Prize in London.

Mushtaq described her win as a victory for range as she collected the prize on Tuesday evening at a ceremony at Tate Modern alongside along with her translator Deepa Bhasthi, who translated the title from Kannada to English.

The successful assortment of 12 brief tales chronicles the resilience, resistance, wit, and sisterhood of on a regular basis girls in patriarchal communities in southern India, vividly delivered to life via a wealthy custom of oral storytelling.

Shortlisted amongst six worldwide titles, Mushtaq’s work appealed to the judges for its “witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating” type of capturing portraits of household and neighborhood tensions.

“This book was born from the belief that no story is ever small, that in the tapestry of human experience every thread holds the weight of the whole,” mentioned Mushtaq.

“In a world that often tries to divide us, literature remains one of the lost sacred spaces where we can live inside each other’s minds, if only for a few pages,” she mentioned.

Translator Bhashti added: “What a beautiful win this is for my beautiful language.” Max Porter, International Booker Prize 2025 Chair of judges, described the successful title as one thing 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,” he mentioned.

“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,” he mentioned.

The tales in ‘Heart Lamp’,  the primary assortment of brief tales to win the prize, have been written by Mushtaq over a interval of over 30 years, from 1990 to 2023.

They have been chosen and curated by Bhasthi, who was eager to protect the multilingual nature of southern India. When the characters use Urdu or Arabic phrases in dialog, these are left within the authentic, reproducing the distinctive rhythms of spoken language.

Fiammetta Rocco, Administrator of the International Booker Prize, added: “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.”     The annual prize celebrates one of the best works of long-form fiction or collections of brief tales translated into English and printed within the UK and/or Ireland between May 2024 and April 2025.

The different 5 books on the shortlist included: ‘On the Calculation of Volume I’ by Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland; ‘Small Boat’ by Vincent Delecroix, translated from French by Helen Stevenson; ‘Under the Eye of the Big Bird’ by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda; ‘Perfection’ by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes; and ‘A Leopard-Skin Hat’ by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson.

Each shortlisted title is awarded a prize of GBP 5,000, shared between the creator and translator, and the successful prize cash is cut up between Mushtaq and Bhashti, who obtain GBP 25,000 every.

It marks the second win for an Indian title since 2022, when Geetanjali Shree and translator Daisy Rockwell gained the coveted prize for the first-ever Hindi novel ‘Tomb of Sand’. Perumal Murugan’s Tamil novel ‘Pyre’, translated into English by Aniruddhan Vasudevan, made it to the longlist in 2023.