On a historic evening at London’s Tate Modern on May 20, 2025, the literary world witnessed a groundbreaking moment as Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp became the first short story collection ever to win the prestigious International Booker Prize. The 77-year-old Kannada writer from Karnataka, India, alongside her translator Deepa Bhasthi, received the world’s most influential award for translated fiction, marking multiple historic firsts that resonate far beyond the glittering ceremony at the Turbine Hall.
This triumph represents more than just another literary accolade. Heart Lamp stands as the first book translated from Kannada to claim the International Booker Prize, introducing the rich linguistic heritage of a language spoken by an estimated 65 million people to the global stage. Deepa Bhasthi made history as the first Indian translator to win the prize, while Banu Mushtaq became only the second Indian author to achieve this distinction, following Geetanjali Shree’s victory in 2022 for Tomb of Sand.
The £50,000 prize money was divided equally between author and translator, a practice that underscores the International Booker Prize’s commitment to recognizing translation as an art form equal in importance to original creation. Each woman received a trophy presented by Max Porter, bestselling Booker Prize-longlisted author and chair of the 2025 judges, who described the winning book as something genuinely new for English readers and a radical translation that challenges and expands understanding of the craft.
A Collection Spanning Three Decades of Activism and Art
Heart Lamp comprises twelve carefully selected short stories written between 1990 and 2023, each offering an unflinching glimpse into the lives of women and girls navigating patriarchal structures within Muslim communities in southern India. The stories are not mere fiction but draw from Mushtaq’s extensive experience as a lawyer and women’s rights activist, with many narratives inspired by real women who sought her help in their darkest moments.
In her own words, Mushtaq explained her creative process with disarming honesty. She stated that her stories focus on how religion, society, and politics demand unquestioning obedience from women, inflicting inhumane cruelty upon them and reducing them to mere subordinates. The daily incidents reported in media and her personal experiences have been her inspiration, creating deep emotional responses within her. Remarkably, she does not engage in extensive research, describing her heart itself as her field of study.
The collection opens intimate windows into domestic rituals and family tensions, revealing worlds rife with judgment, suspicion, righteousness, and sacrifice. Through the quiet of daily life, Mushtaq exposes the enormity of human emotion and experience while simultaneously celebrating the resilience of women who resist violence in its many forms including physical, emotional, social, and psychological manifestations. Her characters face insults for not expressing desire when forced into conjugal beds, reproach for bearing daughters, and constant warnings that any non-compliance stains family honor.
The Stories That Define Heart Lamp
Among the most powerful narratives is the title story, where a woman receives the chilling directive that if she had any sense of family honor, she would have set herself on fire and died. This horrific sanction hangs over the story until its tense conclusion, exemplifying the extreme pressures women face. Another story, Kari Nagaragalu, about a Muslim woman deserted by her husband, was adapted into a film in 2003 that earned the lead actress a National Film Award for Best Actress, demonstrating that Mushtaq’s work has long deserved wider recognition.
The collection’s final story, Be a Woman Once, O Lord!, perhaps best encapsulates the book’s spirit. In it, the narrator teasingly implores her creator about rebuilding the world and creating males and females anew, pleading not to be like an inexperienced potter and to come to earth as a woman to understand their plight. This powerful inversion of perspective challenges readers to imagine divine understanding of women’s suffering.
Banu Mushtaq: A Life of Rebellion and Resistance
Born on April 3, 1948, in Hassan, Karnataka, Banu Mushtaq’s journey to International Booker Prize winner was anything but conventional. Though interested in writing from childhood, she did not become a writer until age 29, when she began as a new mother suffering from postpartum depression. Her first short story was penned in middle school, and her breakout moment arrived at age 26 when a piece was published in the Kannada magazine Prajamata in 1974.
Mushtaq emerged as part of the transformative Bandaya Sahitya movement in the 1970s and 1980s, a progressive protest literary circle in southwestern India that directly translates to the Rebel Literary Movement. This movement arose at a crucial juncture in Karnataka’s literary history when Kannada literature was dismissively described by one politician as bhusa, meaning cowfeed, for its fading relevance to human society and the little it offered women and marginalized communities.
Critical of the caste and class system, the Bandaya Sahitya movement gave rise to influential Dalit and Muslim writers, though Mushtaq was one of the very few women among them. The movement’s favorite phrase captured its ethos perfectly: the dear friend whose heart beats for people’s pain. This compassion and love for the people, particularly Muslim women, permeates every story Mushtaq writes. The Bandaya writers rejected the modernist Navya movement’s tendency to separate art and literature from society’s inequalities, instead embracing magic and the unreal while making prose sound like authentic speech.
Journalism, Law, and Literary Activism
Before fully dedicating herself to writing and law, Mushtaq worked as a reporter for Lankesh Patrike from 1981 to 1990, where she was mentored by the legendary P. Lankesh. This journalistic background profoundly influenced her fiction, grounding her stories in observable reality while her legal practice provided endless raw material. She has described how the inner emotions of legal practice serve as real-life material for her writing, with social struggles and legal advocacy complementing and inspiring her creative work.
Since the 1980s, Mushtaq has been deeply involved in activist movements working to undermine fundamentalism and social injustices in Karnataka. Her advocacy has come at significant personal cost. In 2000, a three-month social boycott was announced against Mushtaq and her family in response to her advocacy for the right of Muslim women to enter mosques. During that period, she received menacing telephone calls, and a man attempted to stab her but was thwarted by her husband. In the early 2000s, she joined civil society group Komu Souhardha Vedike in protesting efforts to prevent Muslims from visiting a syncretic shrine in Baba Budangiri, Chikmagalur district.
Mushtaq has also supported the right of Muslim students to wear hijab in schools, a contentious issue in Karnataka that has sparked heated debates. Despite facing hatred and threats throughout her career, she has never stopped writing, producing six short story collections, one novel, one essay collection, and one poetry collection. Her works have been translated into Urdu, Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, and now English, with Heart Lamp representing the first book-length translation of her work into English.
Deepa Bhasthi: Translating with an Accent
The success of Heart Lamp owes equally to the extraordinary translation work of Deepa Bhasthi, a writer and literary translator based in Kodagu, southern India. Born in Madikeri, Karnataka, in 1983, Bhasthi attributes her love for literature to her paternal grandfather, who died six months before she was born but left her an extensive collection of books, including important works of Russian classics.
After studying commerce and graduating with a degree in journalism from Mangalore University, Bhasthi worked as a journalist for various print media outlets in Bangalore before dedicating herself to translation. Her published translations from Kannada include works by Kota Shivarama Karanth and Kodagina Gouramma, both significant figures in Kannada literature.
The Philosophy of Translating with an Accent
Bhasthi’s approach to translation represents a radical departure from traditional methods that prioritize making translated works easily digestible for Western readers. She describes her process as translating with an accent, a deliberate choice to retain the cultural and historical characteristics of the original language to ensure authenticity. In her translator’s note titled Against Italics, she makes a powerful case against using italics for non-English words, arguing that they serve to distract visually and, more importantly, announce words as imported from another language, exoticizing them and keeping them alien to English.
Bhasthi explained her philosophy in interviews, noting that for decades translators have tried to make texts easier for Western readers while those same readers have never had pizza, burger, or pasta italicized or explained to them. She questions why roti must become flatbread when Western foods receive no such treatment. Her translation deliberately includes a Kannada hum, reminding readers they are engaging with a world set in another culture without exoticizing it. She believes readers should not be underestimated and texts should not be dumbed down simply because readers might be unfamiliar with certain words or phrases.
To prepare for translating Heart Lamp, Bhasthi immersed herself in the cultural world Mushtaq depicts. She was conscious that she knew little about the Muslim communities in Mushtaq’s stories, so during her work on the first draft, she immersed herself in Pakistani television dramas, listened to music by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Ali Sethi, and Arooj Aftab, and even took classes to learn the Urdu script. These efforts helped her get under the skin of the stories and the language Mushtaq uses.
The Journey to International Recognition
The path to the International Booker Prize began with Bhasthi’s translation of the title story for English PEN’s PEN Presents initiative, a digital platform promoting samples of original and diverse literature not yet available in English translation. Her work won the PEN Translates award in 2024, fostering bibliodiversity by connecting under-represented cultural contexts with UK publishers and readers. Following its promotion through PEN Presents, Heart Lamp was acquired by And Other Stories, a Sheffield-based independent publisher that has championed innovative literature in translation for over fifteen years.
This victory represents And Other Stories’ first International Booker Prize win, though it was their sixth nomination. Previous shortlisted or longlisted titles include The Remainder in 2019, Wretchedness in 2021, Phenotypes in 2022, Boulder in 2023, and The Book of Disappearance in 2025. The publisher’s commitment to taking risks and representing a broader range of languages and cultures in translation has finally been rewarded with this highest accolade.
Bhasthi selected the twelve stories in Heart Lamp from a much larger body of work spanning Mushtaq’s career. She was given a free hand in choosing which stories to include, with Mushtaq not interfering in what Bhasthi describes as her organized chaotic process. The translator first read all the fiction Mushtaq had published before narrowing down the selection, ultimately choosing stories that would resonate with international readers while maintaining their cultural specificity and emotional power.
Critical Reception and Literary Significance
The International Booker Prize jury’s praise for Heart Lamp was effusive and detailed. Max Porter, chair of the judges, declared it something genuinely new for English readers, emphasizing that it speaks of women’s lives, reproductive rights, faith, caste, power, and oppression. He noted that although the stories are feminist and contain extraordinary accounts of patriarchal systems and resistance, they are first and foremost beautiful accounts of everyday life, particularly the lives of women. Porter described the translation as radical, creating new textures in a plurality of Englishes while challenging and expanding understanding of translation itself.
The judging panel emphasized how much they loved the book from their first reading, with the evolving appreciation of the stories from different perspectives of the jury becoming a joy to witness. Fiammetta Rocco, Administrator of the International Booker Prize, added that these 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, as the book speaks to our times and to the ways in which many are silenced.
Critics from major publications echoed this enthusiasm. Lucy Popescu in the Financial Times praised how Mushtaq’s compassion and dark humor give texture to her stories, describing them as deceptively simple tales that decry the subjugation of women while celebrating their resilience. She noted that Bhasthi’s nuanced translation retains several Kannada, Urdu, and Arabic words, eloquently conveying the language’s enduring tradition of oral storytelling.
Vogue India observed that though the International Booker Prize is not the first time Mushtaq’s work has been celebrated, recognition by a wider audience for this major literary voice is long overdue. The Guardian commented that the tone varies from quiet to comic, but the vision is consistent, calling it a wonderful collection that offers affecting portraits of family and community while illuminating the lives of Muslim and Dalit women and children in southern India.
The Historic Ceremony and Cultural Impact
The award ceremony at Tate Modern featured several memorable moments celebrating both the winning book and the art of translation. Award-winning singer-songwriter Beth Orton, who served as one of the judges, performed her song Pass in Time during the evening. The event also included a screening of six short films featuring critically-acclaimed actors Lucy Boynton, Jamie Demetriou, Omari Douglas, Rosalind Eleazar, and Peter Serafinowicz performing extracts from the shortlisted books, with Ambika Mod reading an excerpt from Heart Lamp.
The ceremony was attended by high-profile figures from across the cultural spectrum, underscoring the significance of this particular win. In her acceptance speech, Mushtaq offered a poetic reflection on the moment, stating that it felt like a thousand fireflies lighting a single sky, brief, brilliant, and utterly collective. She emphasized that in a world that often tries to divide us, literature remains one of the last sacred spaces where understanding can flourish.
The impact of this win extends far beyond individual recognition. It represents a significant milestone for Kannada literature, demonstrating that regional Indian languages have stories of global relevance and artistic merit. For decades, Kannada writers have produced exceptional work that remained largely unknown outside linguistic boundaries. Heart Lamp‘s success opens doors for other Kannada writers and translators while validating the Bandaya Sahitya movement’s decades-long struggle to create literature that speaks truth to power.
Controversy and Continued Activism
Even after winning the International Booker Prize, Mushtaq continues to face controversy in her home state. In September 2025, the Congress government’s decision to invite her to kick off the Mysore Dasara celebrations involving pooja to Goddess Bhuvaneshvari met with opposition when a video of her criticizing devotion to the Kannada language in the form of Goddess Bhuvaneshwari went viral. This incident demonstrates that despite international acclaim, challenging religious and cultural orthodoxies in India remains fraught with risk.
Mushtaq has never shied away from difficult positions. She speaks Kannada, Hindi, Dakhni Urdu, and English, allowing her to bridge multiple cultural worlds while maintaining her fierce independence. Her literary honors beyond the International Booker Prize include the Karnataka Sahitya Academy Award and the Daana Chintamani Attimabbe Award, recognizing her contributions to regional literature even as conservative quarters have censured her work.
Conclusion
The International Booker Prize victory for Heart Lamp represents a convergence of multiple historic firsts: the first short story collection to win the prize, the first translation from Kannada, the first Indian translator to receive the honor, and a triumphant validation of Deepa Bhasthi’s radical approach of translating with an accent. Beyond these milestones, the win celebrates Banu Mushtaq’s lifetime of courageous writing and activism on behalf of women who have been silenced, oppressed, and diminished by patriarchal structures.
At 77, Mushtaq has demonstrated that literature created outside dominant linguistic and cultural centers can achieve global recognition when paired with translation that honors rather than domesticates the source material. The stories in Heart Lamp matter not because they have been made palatable for Western readers but because Bhasthi preserved their distinctive voice, allowing English readers to hear Kannada’s rhythms and encounter worlds that challenge comfortable assumptions.
The judges praised the collection for its tight-gauged texture and intricate translation that creates an invigorating reading experience rare in contemporary English-language fiction. These stories rise from Kannada interspersed with the extraordinary socio-political richness of other languages and dialects, creating what Porter called beautiful, busy, life-affirming narratives that testify to both Mushtaq’s decades as a journalist and lawyer and her unwavering commitment to championing women’s rights.
As the book reaches readers around the world following its Booker Prize triumph, it carries forward the Bandaya Sahitya movement’s vision of literature that beats with compassion for people’s pain. Mushtaq writes from amidst the women whose stories she tells, for them and through the struggles, details, and complexity of their lives. Her characters include sparky children, audacious grandmothers, buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, oft-hapless husbands, and above all, mothers surviving their feelings at great cost. In these deceptively simple portraits, readers encounter immense emotional, moral, and socio-political weight that urges deeper examination of how religion, society, and politics inflict cruelty while demanding obedience.
The success of Heart Lamp demonstrates that in our divided world, translation remains a vital bridge connecting disparate experiences and fostering understanding across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Bhasthi and Mushtaq’s collaboration proves that authentic representation need not sacrifice accessibility, that challenging English-language readers with unfamiliar words and rhythms enriches rather than diminishes the reading experience. Their International Booker Prize victory will resonate for years to come, inspiring translators to pursue culturally grounded approaches and encouraging publishers to take risks on voices from languages spoken by millions yet underrepresented in global literary discourse.
